The murder of yet another prominent human rights campaigner in Russia is a terrible indictment of a society where political killings are still committed without fear of reprisal. President Medvedev expressed “indignation” at the news that Natalya Estemirova, a campaigning investigator into human rights abuses in Chechnya, was found on a road in Ingushetia with bullet holes in her head hours after she had been abducted from her home in Grozny.

He will need more than indignation if he is to quell the anger voiced around the world, and made forcefully clear to him yesterday on the first day of an official visit to Germany. He will need to show that Russia is determined to bring to justice not only those responsible for Ms Estemirova’s murder, but also those who ordered and carried out the killing of other human rights campaigners. So far, Russia’s record is deplorable. It took President Putin three days to issue any comment on the murder in 2006 of Anna Politkovskaya, the journalist who embarrassed the Kremlin by exposing Russian abuses during the war in Chechnya. He said her crime would not go unpunished. But it has. For more than a year, no serious attempt was made to investigate what happened. And when finally four men were sent for trial, the proceedings were deeply flawed. The alleged assassin escaped abroad and video footage of him went missing The public was barred from the court. Evidence disappeared. No one was accused of ordering the killing. Not surprisingly, all four were acquitted.

Ms Politkovskaya — whose influence Mr Putin contemptuously dismissed as “extremely insignificant” — was one of very few journalists ready to defy the Kremlin crackdown on free reporting. Ms Estemirova showed the same courage and dedication, and in 2007 was the first recipient of the Anna Politkovskaya memorial award. There is little doubt where the orders to kill them both originated. Russia’s mountainous southern fringe is beset by increasingly frequent shootings and kidnappings linked to Islamist insurgents, criminal elements and ethnic feuds. And Memorial, for which Ms Estemirova worked, pointed the finger of guilt directly at Ramzan Kadyrov, the corrupt, brutal pro-Russian Chechen leader.

Russia has a duty to investigate the charges, to look at the murky connections between the former warlord and Chechen gangs and to expose any links with Russia’s ill-disciplined security organs. But hopes for a transparent judicial inquiry are bleak. Russia has still not overcome the communist legacy of gross political interference in the justice system. No state official has the courage to stand up to political intimidation. The FSB and other security organs remain an intrusive, menacing and corrupt state within a state, with no qualms about eliminating “enemies”.

Such tolerance of extrajudicial killings, the manipulation of the courts and what Human Rights Watch called “open season” on anyone trying to highlight human rights abuses are incompatible with democracy and with Moscow’s treaty obligations. Russia is a signatory to the European Convention on Human Rights, the Helsinki Final Act, the Council of Europe and other conventions that outlaw such barbarism. Unless it takes it obligations seriously, it risks more than censure: it risks the contempt of all democratic and civilised nations.