96 Europe and Central Asia Summary of Amnesty International’s Concerns in the Region, January – June 2007 number of reported racist crimes. There were violent mass clashes between ethnic Russians and ethnic groups from the Caucasus in Stavropol in May and in Moscow in June, during which police made a number of arrests. The authorities made statements emphasizing Russia’s multiethnic character. During the period under review, AI spoke to African and Asian students, refugees and asylum-seekers living in Moscow, some of whom said the number of attacks against them and their acquaintances had recently decreased, although verbal and physical racist attacks continued. However, they said that any decrease was not attributable to any improved work of the police, who they said continued to refuse to record reports of racist attacks. In addition, refugees and asylum-seekers who were registered at the office of the UN refugee agency, UNHCR, told AI delegates that the police in Moscow failed to accept their documents as valid, leaving them vulnerable to extortion by the police and increasing their reluctance to report racist incidents. “Joseph” (not his real name), an asylumseeker from the Democratic Republic of Congo, came to Russia in 1997. Joseph told AI that in March he was beaten up and stabbed while travelling on the metro in Moscow. About 16 youths, with closeshaven heads, attacked him without warning at around 6pm one evening, as he was travelling from a church service. They beat and stabbed him, shouting "let's kill him, let's kill him!" Joseph said he thought they attacked him because he was black. When the train arrived at the next station, they ran away. Police officers at the metro station called first aid personnel. Joseph subsequently spent a week in hospital for treatment of his injuries, including head injuries and a stab wound in his chest. However, when Joseph returned to the police station at the metro station Tulskaia, in order to officially report the incident, the police officers there reportedly refused to record the incident, saying it was impossible to find the attackers. He told AI that when he first arrived in Russia violent Amnesty International racism had been even worse, and he had been physically attacked four times in one year. In May the UN Special Rapporteur on contemporary forms of racism, racial discrimination, xenophobia and related intolerance issued his report on his mission to the Russian Federation undertaken in June 2006. The Rapporteur concluded that “while there is no State policy of racism… the Russian society is facing an alarming trend of racism and xenophobia”. He stated that the most striking manifestations included the increasing number of racially motivated crimes and attacks, the growing level of violence with which some of these attacks were carried out, the extension of this violence to human rights defenders, intellectuals and students engaged in the combat against racism, the climate of relative impunity that the perpetrators of such acts enjoyed, and the rise of antiSemitism as well as other forms of religious intolerance, in particular against Muslims. The Rapporteur recommended, inter alia, the adoption of a Federal Plan of Action designed in consultation with and the participation of all actors concerned, and the establishment of an independent institution working to combat all forms of discrimination including racism. Acquittals in prosecution for murder of Vietnamese student (update to AI Index: EUR 01/002/2005) On 1 March the Supreme Court of the Russian Federation upheld the verdict of a St Petersburg court in October 2006, acquitting 17 defendants charged with attacking a Vietnamese student in St Petersburg in 2004. Twenty-year-old Vu An Tuan, studying at the St Petersburg Polytechnic University, had been stabbed to death on 13 October 2004 as he was walking to a metro station in the city. On 17 October 2006 a jury had found five of the defendants not guilty of killing the student, and the other 12 defendants not guilty of charges in connection with the attack. The jury reportedly considered that AI Index: EUR 01/010/2007