It’s not just gay rights suffering in Russia in the days leading up to the Sochi Olympics.  The leading international group Human Rights Watch says Vladimir Putin’s Russia is committing numerous abuses against others such as violating the rights of migrant workers, local residents and environmental activists.

Authorities also practiced “persecution and pressure on critics of the Olympics,” such as environmental activists and journalists both Russian and foreign, “who encountered numerous problems in Sochi,” said Tanya Lokshina of Human Rights Watch.   

One case involved Russian ecologist Yevgeny Vitishko, who “has been telling about the ecological harm of construction” in and around the Sochi Olympic venues.  Vitishko was sent to prison for three years, after spray painting the word “thief” on a fence outside the regional governor’s new home, which was built in a nature reserve where construction had previously been banned by law.

The Human Rights Watch report also details: restrictions on taking part in and voting in elections; restrictions on freedom of assembly and freedom of speech; abductions and extrajudicial killings of Islamists in the North Caucasus; failure to abide with the rulings of the European Court of Human Rights; increasing abandonment of disabled peoples.  This all happened, despite Putin’s government trying to put on a happy face for the rest of the world:

“It would appear that the recent amnesties were undertaken by the authorities to improve Russia’s reputation and improve its image abroad ahead of the Sochi Olympic games,” Lokshina said. “Despite this good news in December, this year has seen an offensive against civil society.  It really started in 2012 when Vladimir Putin returned to the Kremlin.”

Loshina referred to last year’s amnesties granted to hundreds of people charged with or imprisoned for hooliganism in Russia.  The most prominent were international causes celebre Pussy Riot and the Greenpeace Arctic 30.  Lokshina says it was “not as significant as we would like it to be.”