Russia’s annual disaster season is in full swing.
From the Kursk submarine disaster and the Beslan school massacre (along with the simultaneous suicide attacks on two airliners), it seems that if something will go wrong, it’s likely to do so between July and September.
Unfortunately, this year was no different: a major explosion killed as many as 76 people at the Sayano-Shushenskaya hydroelectic plant, sending litres of toxic waste into the Yenisei river. And last week, a wave of violence left scores dead in the Chechnya region.
What was different, however, was the administration’s response to the Caucasian killings.
The LA Times’s Megan Stack reports that Medvedev ‘acknowledged that growing violence in the impoverished southern republic of Ingushetia is rooted in unresolved domestic problems such as corruption and poverty’, rather than external forces, blaming ‘unemployment, clans who could not care less about people . . . as well as corruption, which has really become very widespread among law enforcement authorities’.
All very laudable and grown up, you might say.
So what does Medvedev suggest to curb the unchecked power of law enforcement and monetisation/politicisation of justice?
Curbing the power of juries, of course!
Speaking within mere hours of his earlier humanism, Medvedev said: ‘Jury trails fail for a variety of reasons. We need to think about teams of professional judges considering these kinds of charges’ for extremism and terrorism trials.
What will these changes mean for Medvedev’s pledge to clean up the abuses that spawn extremism?
‘Human rights activists and legal experts said the change compromised the entire premise of jury trials and offered protection to police officers who used brutal methods to extract confessions from suspected terrorists in the North Caucasus’, accordin to the Moscow Times.
Add a legislative disaster to the bloody list.