The number of extremist crimes in the Russian Federation rose 62.4 percent from 2007 to 2008, senior officials say, and Moscow experts suggest that this figure “has nothing in common” with reality and that the actual number of hate crimes is perhaps five times greater than the number reported.

Vladimir Markin, a spokesman for the Investigation Committee of the Russian Federation Procuracy, said that there had been 380 hate crimes reported to the authorities in the first three quarters of 2008, “62.4 percent more” than in the same period a year ago.

Moreover, he added, many of the hate crimes registered this year are more violent and destructive of human life and property than they were in earlier years, a disturbing trend that he suggested the Russian Federation’s militia and prosecutors are doing everything they can to reverse.

Galina Kozhevnikova, the deputy director of the SOVA Analytic Center which tracks xenophobic crime in Russia, said that a far more serious problem was the committee’s failure to include unregistered cases.

But independent experts disputed it, arguing that the authorities were including many incidents that should not be counted as hate crimes even as they ignore the far larger number of criminal actions that are never reported to the militia or that the militia refuses to deal with at all.

(Source: Diena Latvija)