Arseny Roginsky is chair of the board of the International Memorial Society

Rights in Russia: What is the International Memorial Society today? 

Arseny Roginsky: Today Memorial is a network of organisations operating in several countries. Most of our organisations are in Russia— 38 of them. There are about ten organizations in Ukraine, one each in Latvia and Kazakhstan and, further abroad, in Italy, Germany and France. Each organisation operates autonomously and independently; and all of them together form a community, which is called International Memorial. The management board of Memorial is more of a coordinating body than a directive body. Once every four years delegates from all the organisations gather at a conference, re-elect the management board and plan the main strategy for our work going forward. [Read more]

n-ost correspondent Pavel Lokshin spoke with Ludmila Alekseeva on the eve of the first reading in the State Duma of the new NGO bill on 6 July 2012.

n-ost: The Russian Parliament is about to debate a new bill which labels NGOs that receive international funding “foreign agents”. It forces them to reregister and disclose their finances or else to face exorbitant fines, a ban on their activities or even prison terms. How will the Moscow Helsinki Group, of which you are a co-founder, respond to this bill?

Ludmila Alekseeva: The Kremlin will wait in vain for us to register as “foreign agents”. We won’t let ourselves be branded like that. If the bill is adopted we will give up foreign funding. We will accept restrictions on our activities. How other representatives of civil society will respond I don’t know. [Read more]

This is a translation by Rights in Russia of an original German text made available by kind permission of n-ost

Ludmila Alekseeva lives in Moscow and is chair of the Moscow Helsinki Group. She is a member of the Presidential Council on Civil Society and Human Rights.

An interview with Irina Flige, director of the St. Petersburg Memorial Research and Information Centre, by Masha Karp 

Rights in Russia: The Interregional Human Rights Group does much work combating corruption. Could you tell us about this, and about how it ties in with the rest of your human rights work?

Alyona Ob'ezdchikova: I would like to tell you about some aspects of our international work combating corruption. The serious fight against corruption in Russia is just beginning, because state activities in this field still seem to be little more than imitation. I think it’s fair to say that the death in pre-trial detention of Sergei Magnitsky has been a turning point. His death had a major impact in Russia. Those who speak up often do so against corporate interests that are corrupt and criminal. But sometimes they are not even against these criminal groups as such, they just want to honestly carry out their own business. And they face repression from state bodies, most often from law enforcement bodies - the police and prosecutors, either separately or sometimes together. [Read more]

Olga Gnezdilova, barrister and expert on the right of association in Russia, who works with Lawyers for Civil Society in Voronezh and is the author of a recent report on the right of association, talks with Rights in Russia about the current legal framework for civil society organizations in Russia.

Rights in Russia Aleksei Kirillovich, what is your view of the events that are taking place in Russia today? 

Aleksei Simonov Russia has frozen stock still in bewilderment at herself. What has happened in Russia can be compared to the well-known joke about the centipede. The centipede was asked: “Tell us please, how does it happen that straight after the 17th leg, you put down your 26nd? And after that, your 33rd?” And the centipede froze because she had never thought about this. For her it was a natural thing to do. She thought to herself: “How do I do that?” And she wasn’t able to move any more. There is a feeling that Russia, like the centipede, in the weeks before New Year froze stock still in bewilderment at herself. She didn’t expect that she could do anything like that. She simply did not expect what happened first of all on 10 December, and then on 24 December. She honestly had not thought she was capable of anything like it. [Read more]

Rights in Russia: How would you assess the significance of today's court decision? 

Ramil Akhmedgaliev: Today Meshchansky Court rejected our appeal. In fact what happened is that the court simply restated the earlier decision that had been issued by the magistrate. So far as procedural violations are concerned, the judge simply ignored them (I mean, violations of the principles that are at the basis of how a court should work: a court should consider an issue from all sides, in a full and objective manner, and treat prosecutor and defendant equally - the "equality of arms").  

Grigory Melkonyants: What we see is that today’s court decision had already been prepared in advance and the court proceedings and our arguments were of no significance. The judge needed only twenty minutes to reach his judgment and write out his five-page decision, print it and hand us copies. The court system has once again shown that even the most absurd accusations can find support in court. In the event, the nature of the ‘sociological research’ of which we have been accused has still not been made clear to us. In the same way, not a single paragraph was cited during the court hearing. Not a single figure was quoted. None of the accusations were substantiated. Moreover, the charges only speak of posting research of this kind on the site www.golos.org. However, for some reason the case materials contained screen shots of reports of violations taken from the Map of Violations. 

Photos: (c) Grigory Melkonyants and (c) HRO.org

The Russian parliamentary elections on 4th December have put Russian voters in a difficult situation. Aware of the fact that many parties have not even been allowed to register for the elections, and certain that to some extent or other vote-rigging will take place, what can those who oppose the ruling United Russia party and the illegitimate elections do? The debate has been going on in Russia for months. Broadly speaking, there are three main points of view on what to do: 

Martin Dewhirst, University of Glasgow, Scotland, UK, a member of Rights in Russia's international advisory committee.

If I was a citizen of the RF I would definitely vote on Sunday, despite knowing that the 'election' would be far from free and fair. More importantly, I would already have been observing the pre-'election' process and informing the excellent 'Golos' organisation of any violations of the rules and regulations that I had noticed. The run-up to polling day is in some ways more important than what happens on the day itself. ('Golos' seems to have got the Russian neo-Soviet political Establishment really rattled. Its name is etymologically connected to 'glasnost'', not entirely adequately translated as 'transparency'. The present Moscow White House and Kremlin seem to be less tolerant of 'glasnost'' than the Gorbachev faction of the CPSU was in the late 1980s.) What to me is really important is the overall trend or tendency. Are the 2011 'elections' more free and fair or less free and fair than the corresponding 'elections' in 2007, 2003 and 1999? I would be trying to answer that question in my area and discussing it with friends and colleagues elsewhere in the RF.

Why would I vote (as well as observe) on Sunday, being sure that the results would be manipulated at a higher level, if not at any 'observable' levels? Because I think that for all their faults 'elections' even under the wretched Putin regime are at least somewhat more like real elections than 'elections' were in Soviet Russia from 1918 until the late 1980s. I have been an official observer (for the OSCE/ODIHR) of a dozen elections and 'elections' in the former USSR, and on many occasions I have been really moved by how seriously (often in contrast to the situation in my country, where elections are taken for granted by most people, and a huge proportion of the electorate doesn't bother to vote) the opportunity is taken to express one's preference, if one so desires, for a party other than the one in power. At least afterwards such people can tell their friends and family that they at least tried to improve the political situation in their country, however minimal the chances of success. And on this occasion, the more votes there are for parties other than United Russia just might increase the chances of forcing the regime to tolerate the development of a stronger, more active and more tolerant independent society.

Personally, I always prefer to be proactive and positive rather than purely negative, and so I vote for a person or a party rather than against certain people and certain parties. So, if I could, I would vote for Yabloko, if only as the least bad choice. 

Oliver Carrol, Editor, open Democracy Russia 

I think, in the current circumstances, both Navalny's and Nemtsov's suggestions seem appropriate courses of action. Neither is a failproof way of registering dissatisfaction with the system, but complete disengagement with political process, such as suggested by Limonov, is a much more dangerous road to go down. A fixed and corrupt electoral process is, in my opinion, better than no process at all. 

Robert van Voren, Chief Executive of the Global Initiative on Psychiatry 

I would go for option 1, because I think by not participating in the vote you make your point only once, and then have no chance for the next years. Better make sure there is a strong opposition within the Duma and then pressure the government as much as possible and on every occasion. 

Rights in Russia: How did it happen that you were deported?

Luke Harding: It started four months after I arrived. The spark for all this, the catalyst, was an interview that two colleagues in London did with Boris Berezovsky. In this interview Berezovsky said that he was plotting a Russian revolution and was trying to finance the overthrow of the Putin regime. I had never met him, I scarcely knew who he was, but it was clearly a good story. I phoned the Kremlin and spoke to Dmitry Peskov, Putin’s press spokesman, and got a quote from him. The interview was published in The Guardian and my name was the third by-line on a front page story. And then, really immediately after that, very strange things started happening and the FSB kind of fell on me really. There were all sorts of surreal encounters. But the most chilling thing was that the FSB broke into my flat in May 2007 for the first time. [Read more]