Russia "denies visa" to U.S. rights campaigner

(Updates with report of visa denial)

MOSCOW, Feb 20 (Reuters) - Russia has denied an entry visa to the head of New York-based Human Rights Watch, the campaign group said on Wednesday, preventing him travelling to Moscow to present a critical report.

Human Rights Watch said its executive director, Kenneth Roth, was the first member of staff to have been denied a visa to travel to Russia since the collapse of the Soviet Union.

His organisation has joined other rights groups in attacking what they call a deterioration in respect for human rights in Russia during the eight-year rule of President Vladimir Putin. Putin is due to step down after a March election expected to be won by his chosen successor, Dmitry Medvedev.

"The (Russian) foreign ministry knew I was planning to come for a press conference. It cited a changing array of reasons for not issuing me a visa," Roth told a news conference in Moscow by telephone from New York.

"This is the first time that Human Rights Watch has been refused a visa to Russia since the Soviet Union."

"It's also the first time that I personally have been refused a visa any place in the world since Nigeria's Sani Abacha did so in 1997," he said.

No one at Russia's foreign ministry was immediately available to comment on Roth's case.

Roth was planning to come to Moscow to present a 72-page report saying officials were using new legislation to hinder the work of civil society groups in Russia whose activities they do not approve of.



CHOKING EFFECT

The report, issued less than two weeks before a presidential election, said a 2006 Russian law "grants state officials excessive powers to interfere in the funding and operation of NGOs (non-governmental organisations)".

The group said the Kremlin was targeting "various NGOs that work on controversial issues, seek to galvanise public dissent, or receive foreign funding".

"There is little doubt that in practice the law, the manner in which it is implemented, and the context in which it is invoked are intended to have a choking effect on civil society -- a state of affairs fundamentally incompatible with a democratic state that fully observes human rights."

Russia's parliament passed the 2006 law to tighten regulation of NGOs after a series of revolutions in neighbouring ex-Soviet states unnerved the Kremlin with their well-organised civil society movements.

Russian officials believe the revolutions were funded by foreign governments through NGOs who could seek to undermine Russia's own government.

Kremlin critics accuse authorities of suppressing democratic debate in the run-up to the March 2 presidential election and giving blanket television coverage to Putin's favoured successor Medvedev. (Reporting by Chris Baldwin and Nikolai Isayev, editing by Ralph Boulton)