Punished for Being Central Asian in Russia

A year ago, gunmen attacked Crocus City Hall in the outskirts of Moscow during a concert. They killed at least 144 people and injured many hundreds more.

In the wake of this horrific attack, Russian authorities detained four main suspects, all citizens of Tajikistan. Some 23 others were also arrested, mostly of Central Asian origin.

Millions of Central Asians across Russia are, of course, completely innocent of this crime. Yet, they are paying the price anyway. The innocent are essentially being blamed for their ethnicity, as the law and parts of society turn against them in vicious ways.

Russia’s economy is heavily dependent on migrant labor. There are nearly 3.3 million migrant workers from Central Asia in Russia.

Given long-standing xenophobia in Russian society, migrants from Central Asia and other people of non-Slavic appearance have never had an easy time of things. However, the past year has been particularly difficult.

Authorities have been changing the legal landscape for migrants in nasty ways. New regulations give police broader authority to expel migrants without specific court orders. Other changes have prevented hundreds of migrants who were in the country legally from accessing their Russian bank accounts. It’s also now much harder for migrants to send their kids to school in Russia.

With Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, the Russian authorities have been increasingly targetting Central Asian migrants for military recruitment. Russian authorities often use arbitrary detention and threats of deportation to force them to enlist.

In the streets, things are getting uglier. Migrants have been facing ethnic profiling and arbitrary arrests by police. They’re subject to harassment not only by police but by others, including ultranationalist groups.

There have been coordinated physical assaults by young Slavic-looking men on Central Asian workers. Videos taken by the assailants and shared on social media show beatings and pepper-spray attacks accompanied by ethnic slurs.

As one migrant from Tajikistan living in Moscow told Human Rights Watch for a new report, “the life of migrants here today is mired in constant fear and humiliation to put it mildly.”

Of course, Russia has obligations under international human rights law to protect the rights of everyone within their territory without discrimination, including on grounds of national or ethnic origin.

Those rights include the rights to life and to security, freedom from inhuman and degrading treatment and arbitrary detention, freedom of movement, privacy, education, and equality before the law.

But Central Asians in Russia aren’t seeing any of it.