Rights in Russia

Jens Siegert on: Is there a crisis in Russia?

Jens Siegert on Coronavirus; Aleksei Navalny; and Amnesty International:

This week our guest on the podcast is Jens Siegert. Jens is a German citizen who has lived in Russia for many years. From 1999 to 2015 he headed the office of the Heinrich Böll Foundation in Moscow. More recently he was head of the European Union project ‘Public Diplomacy. The EU and Russia.’ He is the author of the book  111 Reasons to Love Russia  (the book is in German). It has to be...

This week our guest on the podcast is Danil Beglets. Danil Beglets is the first defendant in the ‘Moscow case’ convicted to a real sentence to have been released on parole. Given the length of the podcast, we have also divided it into three sections that you can listen to separately. Part Three:  conditions in the penal colony; discrimination on the basis of religion.

This week our guest on the podcast is Danil Beglets. Danil Beglets is the first defendant in the ‘Moscow case’ convicted to a real sentence to have been released on parole. Given the length of the podcast, we have also divided it into three sections that you can listen to separately. Part Two: the penitentiary system; impact of imprisonment on life after release; opinion of human rights defenders;...

This week our guest on the podcast is Danil Beglets. Danil Beglets is the first defendant in the ‘Moscow case’ convicted to a real sentence to have been released on parole. Given the length of the podcast, we have also divided it into three sections that you can listen to separately. Part One: arrest on 27 July 2019; remanding in custody; conditions in pre-trial detention; trial; conviction; trans...

This week our guest on the podcast is Danil Beglets. Danil Beglets is the first defendant in the ‘Moscow case’ convicted to a real sentence to have been released on parole. The issues we discuss in the podcast include: What happened on 27 July 2019 during the protest over the barring of independent candidates from the Moscow City Duma elections? Why were you detained? What were the conditions in p...

This week our guest on the podcast is Lev Markovich Shlosberg. Lev Markovich is a Russian politician, a civil society and human rights activist, and a journalist. He is chair of Yabloko’s Pskov regional branch, a member of Yabloko’s federal political committee and a deputy of Pskov regional legislative assembly from the Yabloko party.  Given the length of the podcast, we have also divided it...

This week our guest on the podcast is Lev Markovich Shlosberg. Lev Markovich is a Russian politician, a civil society and human rights activist, and a journalist. He is chair of Yabloko’s Pskov regional branch, a member of Yabloko’s federal political committee and a deputy of Pskov regional legislative assembly from the Yabloko party.  Given the length of the podcast, we have also divided it...

This week our guest on the podcast is Lev Markovich Shlosberg. Lev Markovich is a Russian politician, a civil society and human rights activist, and a journalist. He is chair of Yabloko’s Pskov regional branch, a member of Yabloko’s federal political committee and a deputy of Pskov regional legislative assembly from the Yabloko party.  Given the length of the podcast, we have also divided it...

This week our guest on the podcast is Lev Markovich Shlosberg. Lev Markovich is a Russian politician, a civil society and human rights activist, and a journalist. He is chair of Yabloko’s Pskov regional branch, a member of Yabloko’s federal political committee and a deputy of Pskov regional legislative assembly from the Yabloko party. The issues we discuss in the podcast include: Shlosberg’s first...

This week our guest on the podcast is Andrei Borisovich Suslov, a professor at Perm State Humanitarian and Pedagogical University who has been involved in human rights education for more than 20 years. The topic of today’s podcast is ‘Human Rights Education in Russia: The Past, Present and Future’. The issues we discuss in the podcast include: the history of human rights education in post-Sov...

This week the guest on our podcast is Timur Georgievich Kobaliya, a Russian human rights activist and graduate of the American International Visitor Leadership Programme and the UK Foreign Office’s first visitor’s programme for human rights defenders in Russia. Timur is the founder of the NGO TV Russia and former head of the Human Rights Council of Volgograd. Timur also heads the international org...

This week our guest on the podcast is the Russian civil society activist Aleksei Andreevich Minyailo. Aleksei Minyailo’s many roles include those of entrepreneur, election observer and philanthropist. He has also been a trainer of election observers – a role he played in Crimea in 2014 when he created a network of independent observers for the referendum. Aleksei Minyailo was also involved in the...

This week our guest on the podcast is the Russian civil society activist Evgeniya Chirikova. Yevgenia Chirikova is especially well known for her campaign to save Khimki Forest. She was the leader of the movement Environmental Defence of the Moscow Region (Eco-defence) and Movement to Defend the Khimki Forest, as well as a member of the organizing committee of Strategy 31 and a member of the Coordi...

This week, our guest is Mikhail Benyash. Mikhail Benyash is a lawyer from the city of Sochi in Krasnodar region. In September 2018 Mikhail Benyash was beaten and detained by police after a meeting with his client who was taking part in a peaceful protest in Krasnodar. The court jailed him for 14 days and in addition sentenced him to 40 hours of compulsory work for disobeying a police officer and v...

Our guest on the podcast this week is Robert van Voren. Robert van Voren is a human rights activist and expert in psychiatry who teaches Soviet and Post-Soviet Studies at Ilia State University in Tbilisi, Georgia and at Vytautas Magnus University in Kaunas, Lithuania. Robert is also executive director of the Human Rights in Mental Health of the Global Initiative on Psychiatry and executive directo...

This week our guest is Sergei Ivanovich Belyaev, president of the Ekaterinburg human rights organisation, Sutyazhnik. Sutyazhnik, one of the most important human rights organisations in the Urals Federal District, was founded in 1994. Sergei Belyaev became president of the organisation in 2002. The questions we discuss in this podcast include: the history and work of the human rights organization...

This week our guest is Boris Lvovich Altshuler. Boris Altshuler is a physicist and human rights activist, a senior researcher at the theoretical physics department of the Lebedev Physical Institute of the Russian Academy of Sciences, chair of the NGO Right of the Child and a member of the Moscow Helsinki Group. The issues we discuss in the podcast include: participation in the Soviet-era human rig...

This week our guest is Professor Bill Bowring. Professor Bowring teaches human rights and international law at Birkbeck College, University of London. Bill Bowring is a practising lawyer who has represented applicants from Russia before the European Court of Human Rights in many cases. He is a co-founder and member of the Board of the European Human Rights Advocacy Centre (EHRAC). He is also Presi...

Today our podcast is dedicated to Arseny Borisovich Roginsky (1946-2017) who passed away on this day, 18 December, three years ago. We were lucky enough to do a long interview with him in April 2013. This podcast contains excerpts from that conversation. As he talked, Arseny Borisovich would smoke and from time to time opened the windows of his office. The noise of the city came in through the win...

This week our guest on the podcast is Irina Vladimirovna Kosterina. Irina Kosterina is Programme Coordinator of the Heinrich Böll Foundation in Russia, a sociologist and gender researcher, trainer and organiser of rehabilitation retreats for activists, human rights activists, journalists and NGO workers. The questions we discuss on the podcast include: what is the Heinrich Böll Foundation and what...

This week our guest on our podcast is Sofiya Yurievna Ivanova. Sofiya is a human rights activist in Ryazan, where she grew up and graduated from the Lomonosov Pedagogical Institute. Sofiya leads the work of the Ryazan School of Human Rights and was a long-time organizer of youth programmes at Ryazan Memorial and the International Youth Legal Camp “Citizen of the World.” Since 2009 Sofiya has been...

This week our guest on the podcast is Olga Borisovna Sidorovich. Olga Borisovna is director of the  Institute of Law and Public Policy  and editor-in-chief of two important law journals:  Sravnitelnoe konstitutsionnoe obozrenie  and  Mezhdunarodnoe pravosudie . The Institute of Law and Public Policy is an NGO and one of the leading independent legal centres in Russia. It w...

This week our guest is Mikhail Valentinovich Savva. Mikhail Savva is a human rights activist, a political scientist and former professor at Kuban State University. In 1993-1994 Mikhail Savva was head of the Department of Nationalities, Regional Policy and Migration of the Krasnodar Region Administration. In 1994-1995 he headed the Department for Nationalities Affairs of the Ministry of Nationaliti...