Ingush Supreme Court Rules Procuracy Violated Rules in Banning Committee on National Unity

Paul Goble

            Staunton, February 24 – The Ingush Justice Ministry and the Procuracy violated their own procedural rules in seeking to ban the Ingush Committee on National Unity, according to a decision of the republic’s Supreme Soviet (fortanga.org/2020/02/prokuratura-ingushetii-v-narushenie-zakona-i-protsessualnyh-norm-okazyvaet-davlenie-na-grazhdanskoe-obshhestvo/).

            On the one hand, the procuracy failed to give advance notice of its plan to close the group and allow it time to correct any mistakes. And on the other, the court held, the Ingush Committee is not a social organization under the terms of the law but rather an initiative group for the organization of a protest. It therefore cannot be banned in the way the Magas authorities sought to do.

            The Committee which continues to function and includes some of the most prominent Ingush protesters has released a statement welcoming the Court’s decision and denouncing once again the procuracy and the republic government as a whole for using illegal tactics to try to suppress civil society in Ingushetia. 

            Meanwhile, in another official act against civil society in Ingushetia, prosecutors called into the lawyer for Magomed Bekov to discuss among other things the activities of the First Aid group which the powers have banned in an effort to demobilize civil society and cut the detainees off from popular support (kavkaz-uzel.eu/articles/346267/).

           

            And in a Chechen action that may affect Ingushetia, the Chechen-Akkintsys  of Daghestan have used a meeting on the anniversary of the Vaynakh deportation in 1944 to cll for the restoration of the Aukhov District in Daghestan, something some in Chechnya have been promoting as a means to open the way for a modification of the Chechen-Daghestani border (kavkaz-uzel.eu/articles/346265/).

            The border talks between Chechnya and Daghestan had been suspended last fall, but this demonstration may have the effect of reopening the issue – and that will certainly inflame opinion among the Ingush about the border accord Yunus-Bek Yevkurov reached with Ramzan Kadyrov in September 2018.

            (For details on this latest Chechen offensive, see kavkaz-uzel.eu/articles/346254/, kavkaz-uzel.eu/articles/346240/, kavkaz-uzel.eu/articles/346263/ and kavkazr.com/a/30449762.html.)