Defamation campaign against human rights defender Igor Kalyapin

On 29 January 2022, unknown individuals placed offensive posters on the door of the apartment where human rights defender Igor Kalyapin is registered, in Nizhny Novgorod. One of the posters displayed "Igor Kalyapin defends terrorists! Shame on foreign agent!", while the other one stated "Igor Kalaypin is a foreign agent! Sold the Motherland for German and American grants!". The human rights defender reported that the person inhabiting the apartment is his 84-year-old mother.

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Igor Kalyapin is a human rights defender, founder and former chairperson of the Committee Against Torture (CAT). He is also the founder and President of the Joint Mobile Group (JMG), which several human rights organizations established in November 2009 following the murder of woman human rights defender Natalia Estemirova in Chechnya. The JMG received the Front Line Defenders Award in April 2011 for their work in investigating torture and disappearances in Chechnya and he was also the 2013 recipient of the Martin Ennals Award. Igor Kalyapin is also a member of Russia's Presidential Council for Civil Society and Human Rights.

The Committee against Torture's public campaign calling for the immediate release of Zarema Musaeva, the mother of human rights defender Abubakar Yangulbayev, caused outrage among Chechen pro-governmental media outlets. The smear campaign against Igor Kalyapin is related to CAT’s intensive work following the recent abduction of Zarema Musaeva by Chechen law enforcement officers.

On 20 January 2022, Chechen law enforcement abducted the mother of human rights defender Abubakar Yangulbayev, Zarema Musaeva, and attacked human rights defenders and lawyers Sergey Babinets and Oleg Khabibrakhmanov and woman human rights attorney Natalia Dobronravova. On 23 January 2022, the Head of the Chechen Republic, Ramzan Kadyrov, called Igor Kalyapin and Novaya Gazeta's journalist and woman human rights defender Elena Milashina "terrorists" and stated that "terrorist should be eradicated."

This is not the first time that the "foreign agent" rhetoric is being used to intimidate human rights defenders from the Committee Against Torture. In 2012, when the Russian government first introduced the "foreign agent" law, human rights defenders from the Committee against Torture were already targeted with a smear campaign based on the “foreign agent” rhetoric. In 2012, a group of unknown individuals targeted the Committee against Torture's deputy Chairperson, woman human rights defender Olga Sadovskaya, inscribing "foreign agent" on fences next to her house. Numerous human rights organizations and defenders in Russia were targeted with similar smear attacks during that period.

Front Line Defenders reiterates its concerns about Russia's "foreign agents" law and condemns the intimidation and targeting of human rights defenders and considers it an attempt to threaten, silence, and stop their crucial work  protecting human rights in the Chechen Republic and other republics of the North Caucasus. Front Line Defenders is gravely concerned by the continued intimidation campaign against human rights defenders from the Committee against Torture working on the case of Zarema Musaeva's.