© ISHR
UN experts officially warned Russian authorities they were looking at allegations of laws placing strict and discriminatory burdens on the work of Indigenous rights groups and activists.
In a letter published on 5 May, Members of the Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination (CERD) informed Russian diplomats in Geneva that recent changes to Russian legal frameworks that have impacted the rights of Indigenous Peoples could ‘infringe’ upon the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination.
The Committee wrote that Russia’s 2024 amendment to a law on environmental expertise ‘significantly restricts Indigenous Peoples ability to engage’ in civic and environmental processes and that such efforts ‘can now only be conducted by organizations employing State‑certified experts’, creating a ‘mechanism to deny accreditation to independent specialists’ and ‘effectively weakening one of the few remaining avenues through which Indigenous Peoples could challenge harmful projects affecting their lands and resources’.
Experts further noted that the establishment in 2020 of a ‘national registry of Indigenous persons’, an entity described as ‘slow’ and ‘bureaucratic’, has ‘restricted’ Indigenous Peoples’ ‘access to many fundamental rights’, especially those ‘related to land, territories, resources, and traditional livelihoods’.
With this communication, the Committee has spotlighted a long, steady erosion of the rights of Indigenous Peoples in Russia. Russia must abolish legislation that tramples the rights of Indigenous populations and conflates action in defence of Indigenous groups’ land and cultural rights as ‘terrorism’.Ulises Quero, ISHR Programme Manager
In their letter, CERD members highlighted the suspension of local and international organisations supporting Indigenous activism and Indigenous human rights defenders in Russia, which they said were ‘increasingly subjected [to] intimidation, surveillance, harassment, threats, arbitrary detention and reprisals as a consequence of their work’.
In April 2026, ISHR was among 106 Russian and international civil society groups that urged Russian authorities to release Indigenous defender Daria Egereva and rights activist Natalia Leongardt, who were both arrested in December 2025 as part of a wider crackdown on Indigenous activists and human rights defenders in the country.
ISHR submitted both Egereva and Leongardt’s cases to the UN Secretary-General’s annual report on reprisals. Egereva’s arrest followed her return on 13 December 2025 from a business trip, which included her participation in the UN climate conference (COP30) in Belém, Brazil (10-21 November).
She was arrested together with Leongardt, who has been liaising with UN offices since around 2005 for the informal network of Indigenous human rights defenders and the Centre for the Support of the Indigenous Peoples of the North (CSIPN).
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