Authors of the report say that while Russia is making progress towards fulfilling the 1985 European Charter on Local Self-Government, which calls for the political, administrative, and financial independence of local government authorities, it must reintroduce direct elections for regional leaders, defend citizens’ current ability to elect mayors,  and begin seriously fighting against corruption.

Particularly problematic, notes the report, is Russia’s federal law regulating local self-government, especially a recent amendment that allows mayors and regional leaders to be fired by the Kremlin.

If Russia brought back direct elections for regional leaders, it could “bring back the former level of regional democracy that Russia enjoyed until 2004,” the authors say.

There was also a recommendation that Russia ease the process of creating and registering political parties – a major complaint of opposition groups. Moreover, conditions should be created so that independent candidates have the ability to participate at all levels of local elections.

The Kremlin was not pleased with the report.

Federation Council member Svetlana Orlova said that “it doesn’t follow to impose [the report’s] point of view onto Russia,” because “there are different procedures in the countries of the Council of Europe, like, for example, there are no direct elections for the heads of regions in Sweden.”

“Nobody can reproach Russia for a lack of democracy on the local level,” Orlova went on. “The system that has developed in Russia is absolutely normal, and it corresponds with all democratic norms.”

Russia has been a member of the Council of Europe since 1996.

Various structures of the council have repeatedly criticized the Russian authorities for many of its policies. In June, the Council of Europe’s Parliamentary Assembly issued a resolution condemning human rights violations in the North Caucasus. Moreover, it said that the situation with violations of human rights and of the supremacy of law in Chechnya, Ingushetia, and Dagestan is the worst in the entire geographic territory covered by member-countries of the Council of Europe.

Dmitri Peskov, press secretary for Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, said that the prime minister was aware of Monday’s events, but stressed that the rally was not held in a location sanctioned by the Moscow city government.

“The prime minister, of course, knows about the demonstration. He knows, in particular, where it was given permission to be held and where it was actually held,” said Peskov.

Putin made a guarded statement last week that protests should always be allowed if their participants follow the law, after being confronted about the issue by a Kremlin-critical rock musician. But as the Moscow Times points out:

City officials banned the rally on Triumfalnaya Ploshchad, saying an authorized pro-Kremlin rally was already scheduled to take place instead.

Preventing unwanted public gatherings by holding official rallies is a well-known tactic. In his 2000 book of interviews, “From the First Person. Conversations with Vladimir Putin,” Putin admitted to using it himself when working in the St. Petersburg administration in the 1990s.

When asked what the prime minister thought about the actions of the police – which included detaining up to 170 people, beating dozens of them, holding them for hours in buses that were more than 95°F, shattering one man’s arm, and manhandling a World War II veteran – Peskov declined to comment.

Any discussion of the incident was blocked in the State Duma on Wednesday by United Russia, the country’s leading political party headed by Vladimir Putin. Communist Party Deputy Sergei Obukhov tried to raise the issue but was shot down by First Deputy Speaker Oleg Morozov, who condemned him for giving an unsanctioned presentation.

Meanwhile, Moscow Human Rights Ombudsman Aleksandr Muzykantsky said that he takes issue with the fact that youth activists routinely hold events on Triumfalnaya Square on the 31st of every month – the same time the Strategy 31 rallies are meant to take place – thus providing the city government with a formal way to refuse to sanction the oppositionists’ event.

“It brings to mind how in the 20s of the last century they [Stalin loyalists – ed.] would disrupt Trotskyist meetings by using young people who stirred up fights. Those who disrupted the meetings were, in the end, convicted of taking part in Trotskyist rallies,” said Muzykantsky, as quoted by Interfax. “Young people were used cynically, and then they were thrown out.”

He added that he pitied the young people who are attracted to taking part in the events that are meant to disrupt the Strategy 31 rallies.

Russian Human Rights Ombudsman Vladimir Lukin, who joined Muzykantsky at Monday’s rally as an observer (and who police attempted to arrest), called the detentions “illegal” and said that the idea of a “sanctioned action” does not actually exist in Russian legislation. Instead, according to the constitution, organizers are only required to notify the local government if they plan to hold a large demonstration, he said.

Just as a two-day summit between Russia and the European Union wrapped up on Tuesday, EU representatives said that they knew of Lukin’s comments and promised to investigate Monday’s actions by the Moscow police.

Michael Webb, the deputy in charge of the EU delegation, said that “on the whole, the European Union supports Russia so that it fulfills the obligations that it undertook as part of the Council of Europe. And also so that it realizes civil rights as secured by the constitution. In particular, the right to free assembly and free speech.”

Commission member Andreas Gross told the press that the Russian government had failed to observe the right to free assembly. “It is not apparently to the Russian government that the right to free assembly is a basic human right and should not be a topic for debate,” said Gross.

Russian opposition groups have long complained of brutal repression in response to their rallies, which are usually denied sanction by regional authorities. Of particular note are the Strategy 31 rallies organized by the Other Russia coalition, dedicated to the 31st article of the Russian constitution guaranteeing freedom of assembly. Moscow city authorities have categorically refused to sanction the rallies, although organizers have chosen to hold them regardless. Each of the half-dozen rallies has ended with scores of detentions and brutal repression by the police.

While the Moscow mayor’s office has insisted that the Strategy 31 rallies would be sanctioned if the organizers agreed to move them to another location, Gross said that he found such pretexts untenable. Moreover, he said that he made it clear to government authorities that beating members of unsanctioned protests was not acceptable.

Commission member György Frunda brought attention to problems in Russia’s electoral system. The current 7 percent threshold that a political party must reach during elections to hold seats in the State Duma is too high, he said. “The electoral system on the whole is in need of change,” as was the state prosecutor’s office, Frunda added. Gross said in conclusion that the commission hoped to see an increase in the number of parliamentary parties in the State Duma after the next set of elections.

Currently, the only political parties in the State Duma are the Kremlin-backed United Russia party(holding 70 percent of the seats), the Communist Party (12.7 percent), and the loyal oppositionist parties A Just Russia (8.9 percent) and the Liberal Democratic Party (8.4 percent). The 7 percent threshold makes it very difficult for opposition parties to gain seats, especially given that elections in Russia are already generally accompanied by widespread voter fraud in favor of United Russia.

The monitoring commission plans to return to Russia in July, and will release a full report of its findings in the beginning of 2011.

“Well-known circumstances do not allow us to do this [to ratify the protocol – Ed.],” said Gryzlov. “The issue has to do with terrorist activity in Russia.”

Russia has had a moratorium on the death penalty since 1996, when it joined the Council of Europe under the condition that it would work to prohibit capital punishment. Since then, however, the practice was never banned outright. Gryzlov stressed that despite this, the majority of other obligations that Russia agreed to upon joining the Council had been fulfilled. “For sure, we haven’t ratified the sixth protocol; however, the problem is being resolved differently, but it is being resolved” by continuing the moratorium, he said.

The Russian Constitutional Court ruled last November to extend a moratorium on capital punishment, which had been set to expire in January 2010. The move overruled the court’s original decision in 1999 to allow the introduction of the death penalty if every region of Russia had provisions allowing for jury trials, which Chechnya, the last region without them, was planning to introduce at the beginning of this year.

A January poll by the research center VTsIOM estimated that 44 percent of Russians support a full introduction of the death penalty, with 18 percent in opposition. The majority of those in favor consist of members of the Communist party and elderly Russians, while most of those opposed are members of the opposition parties Yabloko, Right Cause, and Patriots of Russia, as well as young adults. Support for the death penalty in relation to terrorism, however, is relatively higher. In 2005, when VTsIOM estimated public support for capital punishment to stand at 84 percent, 96 percent of respondents were in favor of using the death penalty as punishment for acts of terrorism.

Friday’s decision makes Russia the last and final member of the Council of Europe to sign the protocol, opening the way for the court to adopt a series of much-needed reforms.

Russian legislators initially refused to sign the protocol in December 2006, saying that the reforms would infringe upon Russian interests.

Specifically, the protocol would provide for a committee of three judges to decide whether or not to consider a complaint that had been filed in the court. Russian deputies also objected to a provision allowing the court to further investigate a complaint before it decided whether or not to take it under consideration.

Statements earlier in the week by State Duma Speaker Boris Gryzlov met with initial skepticism, with analysts fearing that the rhetoric echoed similar statements by Duma deputies that had previously gone unfulfilled.

The European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg has handed down a vast number of rulings against Russia for rights abuses. It has ruled against Russia more than 120 times in cases related to Chechnya alone. Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin has accused the court of making “politicized” decisions.

According to the RFE/RL news service, the Duma’s decision to finally ratify the protocol is likely political. In particular, a pending $98 billion case from the former oil company Yukos against Russia that accuses the country of driving it into bankruptcy through unfair prosecution is a likely factor.

“The consideration of the Yukos case has been postponed for months on various pretexts. Now that all the possibilities of delays have run out, the ratification lever is being used,” says Russian political analyst Nikolai Petrov. “The Kremlin is interested in mollifying the European Court as much as possible by improving Russia’s image with the judges.”

Chairman of the Constitutional Court Valery Zorkin stated that the decision corresponds to international norms agreed to by Russia that ban or recommend banning the use of capital punishment.

Zorkin also noted that it was only by entering into recognizances to abolish the death penalty that Russia was accepted into the Council of Europe in 1996.

The Constitutional Court ruled in 1999 that the death penalty may only be introduced in Russia when jury trials were implemented throughout the country. With Thursday’s ruling, the one remaining region without jury trials, Chechnya, will introduce them by January 2010. Zorkin stated, however, that “this will not allow the possibility for use of the death penalty,” effectively banning the practice.

Public reaction to the decision has been mixed.

Soviet dissident and prominent human rights activist Lyudmila Alexeyeva praised the court’s decision in a statement to Reuters. “I hope the death penalty does not return in Russia, even though the majority of the population and the majority of lawmakers support it,” she said. “In a country with such a cruel history and where human life meant so little for so long, there is nothing surprising in the fact that the majority of people support the death penalty”.

According to Mikhail Krotov, presidential envoy to the Constitutional Court, Russia has yet to completely ban the death penalty because of strong public support for the practice. “The society needs more time to ban the death penalty, but the government structures support a ban on capital punishment,” he said.

While the death penalty has not been used in Russia since 1996, various polls estimate support among Russians for capital punishment to be between 50 and 80 percent. Support for the practice thrives despite denouncements from prominent politicians and other public figures. Prime Minister Vladimir Putin has called the death penalty “pointless and counterproductive,” and has stressed the importance for Russia to be accepted in the international community despite public opinion.

Human rights activist Evgeny Ikhlov said the court’s decision did not go far enough and decried it as politically motivated. By deliberating on the use of the death penalty and not on the legal issue of its very existence, he says that the court “wiggled out of the situation” to avoid the political consequences of Russia’s exclusion from the Council of Europe, while failing to ban the practice outright. “The Constitutional Court does not have a right to make political statements, only legal ones,” Ikhlov said.