RUSSIA    –  Five LGBT activists have been detained in Moscow while trying to submit a petition signed by two million people calling for an investigation into the torture and persecution of gay men in Chechnya. A violent crackdown on gay people in the region was first reported in the newspaper Novaya Gazeta last month. It alleged more than 100 Chechen men suspected of being gay had been rounded up, and at least three killed. The Guardian independently spoke to gay Chechen men who gave accounts of beatings and torture in the ultra-conservative, predominantly Muslim southern Russian republic. The activists delivering the petition had met outside a central Moscow metro station and were planning to deliver boxes of signatures to the prosecutor general’s office close by, activist Irina Yatsenko told reporters. Almost immediately police accused them of holding an unsanctioned protest and detained them, she said.[+]http://abonnement