MOSCOW, August 5 (RIA Novosti) – Human rights advocates and a Vietnamese diplomatic mission in Russia have expressed concerns over the living conditions of hundreds of migrants being kept in a tent camp set up last week in eastern Moscow after a string of police raids.
More than 600 people are reportedly being housed in green tents with bunk beds as of late Sunday in the camp after police detained some 1,400 migrants, mostly from Vietnam, over alleged violations of migration rules.
“The conditions of detention are bad. Forty people staying in a 50-square-meter tent – these are simply inhuman conditions,” Le Hong Truong, chief of the consular office of the Vietnamese Embassy in Moscow, said Monday, Russian media reported.
According to Truong, the Vietnamese Embassy had asked Russian authorities to provide accurate information on the situation at the camp and the number of Vietnamese citizens detained. He added that the Vietnamese diplomatic mission had provided interpreters to assist in communication with the detainees because many of them did not speak Russian.
Members of the Kremlin’s human rights council, including the country’s chief rights ombudsman, Vladimir Lukin, inspected the camp on Friday. The group said the tents were overpopulated and lacked cleanliness.
“It is very important that these people, and they are people, have rights before they leave our country,” Lukin told reporters.
Under Russian law, detained foreigners are supposed to be kept at special centers for non-citizens. But Moscow authorities ran out of space for such detainees last week after police rounded up about 3,000 in a series of raids.
After their visit to the camp, the human rights activists delivered two tons of rice for the detainees on Monday to replace the previous buckwheat meals, which they said were too uncommon and hard to digest for the Vietnamese. They also brought more than 50 fans, bed sheets, antibacterial cleaning agents and stationery.
The raids, on Moscow markets and other migrant workplaces, began last week in the wake of an attack on a police officer who was seriously injured at a market while trying to detain a suspected sex offender.
Police officials said earlier that the camp, set up to accommodate 900 people, would provide temporary housing for the migrants awaiting court rulings on deportation. The camp is guarded by police officers, while the Emergencies Situations Ministry runs the kitchen there.
The head of the non-governmental organization Officers of Russia and a member of the Interior Ministry’s Public Council, Anton Tsvetkov, said Monday after visiting the camp that migrants’ living conditions there were better than when they were working and residing illegally at a nearby industrial site.
“We talked to them through an interpreter and learned that they had to pay up to $2,000 to come to Russia. Most of them didn’t have the money and traveled here in debt,” Tsvetkov said. He said many had their passports taken away from them by their former illegal employers.
Meanwhile, Moscow Region police and Federal Migration Service officials said Monday that they had raided a fruit-and-vegetable storage facility in the town of Dolgoprudny and detained some “600 illegal migrants” there. Senior regional police official Nikolai Lazebny said the area was functioning like a small town, with its own banks, prayer rooms, a clinic and a cafe.
