List of Journalists Killed in Russia - Partial Justice and Anatomy of Injustice

Partial Justice and Anatomy of Injustice

The IFJ report, Partial Justice, maps the changing contours of impunity in Russia. It shows and explains the process whereby particular deaths are selected by the IFJ, CPJ and other monitors. It stresses the need for an end to total impunity in those remaining regions (the North Caucasus, St Petersburg) where no one has ever been prosecuted for killing a journalist, and for an advance beyond partial justice in those cases where it is known, or strongly suspected, that the murder of a journalist was planned and premeditated. It is not enough to put the killer on trial; he must be accompanied, or followed, by his accomplices, and the intermediaries and individuals who ordered and paid for the killing.

The IFJ report opens and closes with the Politkovskaya murder and the subsequent trial, which ran from November 2008 to February 2009. After 16 years of unsolved killings, the international outcry over her death made this a test case that might finally breach the barrier of partial justice. The evidence presented by the prosecution, unfortunately, did not convince the jury or satisfy other key participants. Anatomy of Injustice, the report by the CPJ, displays the conclusions the Committee has reached about certain deaths since 2000: the authorities do not acknowledge some of these deaths as homicide, while several others reached the courts but have led at most to the conviction of the perpetrator, not those who ordered the killing.

Following different routes the two reports reach a similar set of recommendations. They call on the Russian authorities to give investigators and courts the backing they need to identify and pursue all those responsible for the deaths of journalists and, in the meanwhile, to keep press and public better informed about their progress in tackling such disturbing crimes.