Unnerving details are beginning to emerge of the brutal assault on Memorial worker Bakhrom Hamroev, who was attacked outside his home on the evening of June 6.  Hamroev, who specializes in issues relating to Central Asia and Islam, apparently believes the attack was designed to prevent him from carrying out his professional activities.

Memorial has fought fearlessly in the past to expose rights abuses in Russia and its former satellite states, demonstrated pointedly by the fact that the group’s chief, Oleg Orlov, is currently in a fearsome litigation battle with Chechen president Ramzan Kadyrov over rhetoric surrounding the death of award-winning rights worker Natalia Estemirova, who was murdered in the North Caucasus in 2009.  Human Rights Watch has made its abhorrance for the abuses of rights advocates clear in the following plea for justice, outlining some of the details of the beating, which all the more frighteningly, is not Hamroev’s first:

“This is the second brazen beating of Hamroev, and it should not go unpunished,” said Tanya Lokshina, Russia researcher at Human Rights Watch. “Russia needs to put a resolute end to the climate of impunity for attacks on human rights defenders, which emboldens the perpetrators and perpetuates attacks.“