Russia: A Phone Call to Putin; How do Kremlin authorities deal with whistle-blowers? silence them.(Vladimir Putin)

Byline: Anna Nemtsova

For 48-year-old Mekhti Mukhayev and the men of Zumsoy, a hamlet high in the Chechen mountains, the Russian Army's "special operations" have become a depressingly familiar fact of life. In January last year the village was bombed, apparently at random. Soon afterward, a unit of Russian troops in ski masks landed in helicopters and ransacked the villagers' houses for valuables. As they left they detained Mukhayev's brother Vakha, his 16-year-old son, Atabi, and two others. None has been seen since. Despairing of finding any news through official Russian channels, Mukhayev and his kin tried another route: they filed a complaint with the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg.

That almost cost him his life. On the night of Dec. 29, Mukhayev's house was raided and he was taken away. In January, Zareta Hamzatkhanova, a lawyer for Memorial, a Russian human-rights NGO, found him in a local detention center, barely able to stand. According to Mukhayev, he had been tortured for 11 days. "The officers would beat me and give me electric shock and threatened that they'd make me disappear," he wrote in a legal affidavit.

Since 1998, the Strasbourg court has received more than 28,000 human-rights complaints from Russia, most concerning abuse of power by police and judicial corruption--more than any other country in the Council of Europe. Of those, the court has ruled on 106 and found the Russian state guilty in 90 cases. Russian authorities, embarrassed, are increasingly retaliating. According to Philip Leach, a lawyer for the European Human Rights Advocacy Center in London, at least five petitioners to the Strasbourg court have been killed and dozens kidnapped, beaten and tortured by police since 2001. "People are being intimidated for using the mechanism meant to protect them," he says.

According to Andrey Nikolayev, a lawyer with the Judicial Initiative, another Russian human-rights NGO, police go to elaborate lengths to keep people from filing protests with the Strasbourg court. In November, for instance, prosecutors in Grozny paid a friendly visit to a man named Ruslan, a motor mechanic whose mother had petitioned over the January 2001 disappearance of her eldest son, Isa, arrested by Russian forces during a passport check. Local authorities ordered Ruslan to write Prosecutor General Vladimir Ustinov in Moscow, requesting him to close the case. "They told me they could arrange my disappearance, too," he says. Moscow ...