The European Union has marked the 15th anniversary of the murder of prominent investigative reporter Anna Politkovskaya in central Moscow by renewing its call for all those responsible to be brought to justice.
Politkovskaya — a critic of Russian President Vladimir Putin whose reporting exposed high-level corruption in Russia and rights abuses in the North Caucasus republic of Chechnya — was shot dead in her apartment building on Putin’s birthday — October 7, 2006.
The case remains unresolved, and the European Court of Human Rights in 2018 found that the Russian state had failed in its obligation to adequately investigate the killing.
While the authorities convicted a group of individuals who carried out the contract killing, they “failed to take adequate investigatory steps to find the person or persons who had commissioned the murder,” the Strasbourg-based court found.
“Today, we pay tribute to the memory of Anna Politkovskaya, the Novaya Gazeta journalist and internationally recognized Russian defender of human rights, who spoke out against violence and injustice and continued her journalistic work despite repeated intimidations, including a mock execution and poisoning attempt,” the EU spokesman on foreign affairs Peter Stano said in a statement.
Stano said that the EU calls on the Russian government to ensure that all those behind the assassination are brought to justice “through an open and transparent judicial process.”
Russia should also uphold its national and international obligations to “protect human rights and democratic values,” he added.
The spokesman noted that the commemoration of Politkovskaya’s murder takes place at a time when “independent media and civil society face unprecedented pressure from the Russian government, notably through the designation of ever more media outlets, civil society organizations, but also individual journalists and activists as ‘foreign agents’ or ‘undesirable.'”
