GENEVA, Sept 23, 2024 (BSS/AFP) - The rights situation inside Russia has become "much worse" in the past year amid a tightening "state-sponsored system of fear and punishment", a United Nations expert warned Monday.

"Nobody is safe," Mariana Katzarova, the UN Special Rapporteur on the rights situation in Russia, told reporters in Geneva.

Already a year ago, the independent expert said repression had hit "unprecedented" levels amid the war Moscow is waging in Ukraine.

But the quashing of dissent had intensified since then, Katzarova warned as she presented her latest report.

"The country is now run by a state sponsored system of fear and punishment, including the use of torture with absolute impunity," Katzarova said.

"Human rights defenders, journalists and political figures are persecuted and incarcerated in greater numbers, anti-war dissent of any kind is criminalised, police violence is condoned," she said.

In addition, she pointed to the increased use of arbitrary arrests while "prison conditions have worsened with increased solitary confinement and death in custody".

Political prisoners, the number of which she put at more than 1,300, suffered the worse conditions as "many are tortured".

For the expert, the death in custody of Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny last February was "just one example of the brutal treatment of the political opposition".

Katzarova, who was appointed by the UN Human Rights Council but who does not speak on behalf of the United Nations, also warned of "massive new surveillance of everybody on the Internet".

"Russian authorities are not only physically going after the dissidents and anti-war critics and human rights defenders, but also now through the internet," she said.

"Nobody is safe".

Katzarova's report focused on violations of civil and political rights in Russia, especially in connection with any signs of dissent against Moscow's invasion of Ukraine.

"We cannot look at the human rights situation in Russia without seeing the stark link between aggression abroad and repression at home," she said.

"Anything that is happening inside Russia at the moment, it's coloured by the ongoing ... aggressive war against Ukraine."