On 19 December 2017 Pushkin Club and Rights in Russia held a joint event to discuss the trial of Yury Dmitriev, a Gulag researcher, who has been locating and exhuming the mass graves of Stalin's victims since 1980s. He was arrested on 13th December 2016 and remanded in custody on trumped-up charges. His trial started in June 2017 and is still going on. The Dmitriev affair was discussed by lawyers and human rights activists. The event was chaired by John Crowfoot, researcher and translator and a trustee of Rights in Russia, who has created the site https://dmitrievaffair.wordpress.com, and speakers included Dr. Andrea Gullotta of Glasgow University, a historian and specialist on the Solovki Special Purpose Camp, who met and talked to Yury Dmitriev during his research trips to Karelia and the White Sea, and Bill Bowring, a practicing barrister and Professor of Law at Birkbeck College. 

On 20 April 2017 Russian human rights activist Anastasia Zotova spoke at London's Pushkin House at an event organized jointly by Rights in Russia and Index on Censorship. She was in the UK to represent her husband, released political prisoner Ildar Dadin, who was a finalist (and as it turned out a winning finalist) at the 2017 Index on Censorship Freedom of Expression Awards. Anastasia Zotova has done more than anyone in recent years to expose conditions in Russia’s large and often brutal penitentiary system.