The summer session of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE) took place in Strasbourg last week. Russia’s delegation was not present since its membership had been suspended by PACE on 14 March due to the Ukraine War.
The session was not covered in Russia at all, although Russia itself was a popular topic for discussion in Strasbourg these days. Apart from the Ukraine War and the humanitarian disaster it produced, as well as the 2014 Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 shoot-down which Russia had been officially declared responsible for, the human rights situation in Russia’s North Caucasus region attracted special interest, as Frank Schwabe from Germany, who was appointed PACE’s rapporteur on the North Caucasus in 2017, presented his long-prepared report.
Novaya Gazeta’s investigation on the matter aroused PACE’s interest back then, especially the situation on LGBT and female rights violations in the androcratic Muslim regions of Russia’s south.
Five years have passed, and the Assembly has finally decided to revisit this topic.
Surprisingly enough, Russia supported Schwabe’s appointment in 2017. The country’s MPs gave the PACE member a warm welcome in Moscow in 2019 and even organised a trip to Chechnya for him.
The reasons behind this hospitality are pretty obvious. In 2017, Russia’s MPs were reinstated in Strasbourg after having been suspended for three years due to the 2014 Crimea crisis. Additionally, Schwabe was so nice to the Russian MPs that some human rights activists started to believe Russia was using the PACE rapporteur for its own propaganda. Thus, Interfax, a Russian news agency, referred to Schwabe as “PACE rapporteur on LGBT rights in Chechnya.” Petr Tolstoy, the State Duma deputy chairman, stated with confidence that Chechnya’s oppressions of the LGBT community were “nonsense” and that the rapporteur would “see this for himself when he discusses the matter with the Head of Chechnya [Ramzan Kadyrov].”