GENEVA: 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 on 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 herlatestreport.

`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, antiwar 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`. -AFP