Posts tagged as:

Human rights

Georgia war – both sides bad

November 19, 2008

At last! A report that recognises that both Russia and Georgia did some pretty shocking things during the war in August.
The report said that in attacking Tskhinvali, the South Ossetian capital, on Aug. 7 and 8, Georgia fired Grad missiles that seemed to miss their targets and hit civilian areas. It also criticized Russia for [...]

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British diplomats and activists attacked in Russia

May 29, 2007

This weekend marked yet another not particularly glorious episode in Russo-British relations, as one diplomat and two (well known) British gay rights activists were attacked in separate incidents.
First in line for a battering was Nigel Gould-Davies, first secretary at the British embassy in Moscow. He was attacked at 1am on Saturday morning, as he [...]

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Garry Kasparov being hassled again

May 19, 2007

The harrasment of Garry Kasparov continues – this week Kasparov was prevented from flying to Samara, venue for this weekend’s EU-Russia summit:

Yesterday Mr Kasparov apparently outdid himself when he was detained at Moscow’s Sheremetevo airport on suspicion of forging his own airline ticket.
It was an elaborate plot, with suspicion falling on all those travelling with [...]

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Russian blogs under legal threat?

April 4, 2007

Interesting post at Publius Pundit about a loophole in the law that could mean Russian bloggers being held to the same standards as fully fledged media publications.
Publius worries that this could lead to a crackdown on blogs.
I’m a little puzzled though, as I’d always thought it was pretty much common practice everywhere in the world [...]

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Interview with Khodorkovsky’s cellmate

March 9, 2007

Robert Amsterdam posts an interview with one of the men who has shared a cell with Mikhail Khodorkovsky. Here’s a snippet from the author’s introduction:
They wouldn’t put just anybody in the same cell as THIS jailbird. No, they would place a “brood hen” – a specially trained prisoner-informant. The “brood hen’s” job is to [...]

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Throwing around some stats

March 9, 2007

A couple of posts about statistics have caught my eye recently. One set of statistics show Russia in a relatively positive light, the other in a more gloomy light.
First up, the negatives. Apparently, more journalists have been killed in Russia over the past 10 years than anywhere else in the world bar Iraq:
The [...]

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“Khodorkovksy content with choice of prison”

October 25, 2005

“Khodorkovsky content with choice of prison” reads the interfax.ru headline.
Khodorkovsky posted a statement on his official website on Tuesday to “thank” the authorities for sending him “to a land of political prisoners, convicts and the Decembrists [participants in the 1825 uprising in Imperial Russia].”
Somehow, I don’t think the wonderful facilities are the reason for [...]

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Khodorkovsky sent to prison in Siberia, plans to complete PhD

October 24, 2005

Following his sentencing, ex-Yukos boss Mikhail Khodorkovsky has been sent to a jail in Siberia – YaG-14/10 to be precise, which is near Chita. His co-defendant, Platon Lebedev has been sent to a prison in the Arctic region of Yamalo-Nenets, 2,000 km north of Moscow.
There is some concern about the legality of these [...]

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Closed cities from the inside

October 10, 2005

Last week I wrote about the disgraceful number of closed cities in Russia, another of those leftovers from an anarchic age that Russia remains addicted to, despite (or perhaps because of) the restrictions it places on the human rights of their 1.7 million residents.
In a rather timely decision, the BBC have just decided [...]

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Closed cities and the Democratic Deficit

October 6, 2005

If you thought that the demise of the Soviet Union meant the demise of closed, or secret cities, then you’d be wrong. Today, it is thought that there are up to forty closed cities (also referred as ZATO’s, or Zakrytye Administrativno-Territorial’nye Obrazovaniia) in Russia, although the Russian government will only confirm the existence of [...]

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Solider Nixon

October 3, 2005

What happens when you try to buy Russian literature in small town Queensland?
So I asked the old half-deaf biddy in the second hand bookshop if she had any books by Solzhenitsyn.
“Soldier Nixon, I don’t think so. Are they crime or thrillers or what ?”
Brushing aside the concept that Stalinist era oppression might have been [...]

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Russia demands OSCE reforms

September 13, 2005

OSCE delegates are considering a raft of Russian proposals to make the organisation ‘more effective.’  Russia effectively held a gun to the OSCE’s head a year ago, when it threatened to withold it’s budget contributions unless it’s proposals were taken seriously.
In particular, Russian diplomats want to force changes to the Office of Democratic Institutions (ODIHR), [...]

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Russian ambassador no fan of gays

August 12, 2005

Can you imagine ambassador from the US, or an EU country saying this?  They’d be fired before you could even blink.
Russian Ambassador to Latvia Viktor Kalyuzhny thanked Cardinal Janis Pujats, head of Latvia’s Roman Catholics, for the latter’s criticism of the recent gay and lesbian parade in Riga, the Baltic Times newspaper reports.
The [...]

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Russia leads the world in human rights…

July 27, 2005

I’ve just read this transcript of a report from Russian tv show The Main Theme, which essentially seems to be about how unfair it is that Russia is accused of human rights abuses when the United Kingdom is abusing them far more than Russia. 
The only problem with this argument, of course, is that it [...]

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State Dept Human Rights Report

March 1, 2005

The US State Department has just released its 2004 Human Rights Report.  I haven’t had chance yet to do more than read the introduction yet, in which Russia features strongly. 
Here are the key paragraphs from the introduction relating to both Russia and Ukraine, I’ll post more over the next few days if I find [...]

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