Presidential advisers will continue their work on their own

The Human Rights Council under the President of the Russia plans on creating its own public organization

It was announced by Ludmila Alexeyeva, the head of the Moscow Helsinki group, a member of the Council. According to her, the Council was renewed three times in the past 10 years: twice by Vladimir Putin and once by Dmitri Medvedev. “I myself have been a member of this Council for 10 years now, since 2002. I would like to say that this latest convocation is an outstanding one. I have worked in it with great pleasure (and I think not me alone). Different people are gathered here, they take up different businesses, not all of them are human rights advocates as I am. There are not many professional human rights advocates in this Council, but all its members are very creative and strong personalities, they are the best at what they do, and they all treat their assignments in the Council and its working groups very seriously.

“We have developed an idea, and we discussed it long before the term of our Council started to expire. The idea is the following: it is obvious that the next President will form a new Council, and not all of us will become reelected, moreover, we don’t know what priorities this new Council will set for itself, but at the same time we have lots of work we would like to finish. So we decided to carry on working after the powers of the Council expire by creating a new public organization – registered or not, I don’t know yet – with the same name, “Public Council for civil society and human rights development”, only without the ending “under the President of the Russian Federation”. And all the working groups created by our Council will carry on their work within the framework of this public organization”, Alexeyeva explained.

Member of the Council Elena Panfilova also expressed he wish to carry on with her struggle with corruption. “The problem of corruption, or, better to say, the problem of fighting corruption – this is what we do in our group for civic counteraction to corruption, as well as in the group for resonance cases (the case of Magnitsky and many others) and in the group for legal reform. So you see that this problem ‘spreads itself’, and if you look closer you’ll see the echo of this theme of corruption in the cases related to children’s rights, to the elections and so on. I am really displeased with myself as I couldn’t do more, as it is not only about my hopes, but it is about the hopes of all the people who come to us every day. It is something that could make one find a 25th hour in his day schedule. But at the same time I can tell you that I’m absolutely happy and proud to work with all the members of this Council. My colleagues have taught me a lot. I’ve never been a major specialist in the field of civic society development, but I’ve learned a lot in these past years and I’ve tried to pass on my own experience to my colleagues as well. But I was completely astonished by the unavailability of the authorities – especially the local ones – for the proposals made by the civic society, even if they are made by the Presidential Council itself. I’ve faced the following odd situation more than once: you offer them a document that says nothing more than ‘2X2=4’, but they say: “We have some other data on this topic”. It is what happens in the case of Magnitsky, and in many other cases. So what can one do in such a situation, when they got his mission directly from the Council or the President himself? What other leverage could they use? The corrupt bureaucrats fight for their own corrupt interests, for preserving their place in the government, and they don’t care about all the authority that backs your claim up. So you can understand that I was very happy to work with all these people but more than displeased by the ‘other side’ of our power, by the ways in which it really works.

“We need to deal with the unresolved issues of civic counter-action to corruption in the nearest future. This is the protection of the declarants, the creation of penal systems for illegal enrichment, for a conflict of interests, and I mean serious penalties. And, of course, we should finalize all the already introduced legal norms which exist but don’t work for now. When we are able to resolve the problem of conflict of interests, when we finally get rid of such people in power, maybe we’ll make the work of the future Councils a bit easier”.

The topics of judicial an police reforms are also urgent for Russia. According to the Council member Mara Polyakova, “during our seating in Council we presented a whole series of legislative initiatives that were carried out later on. For examples, our citizens got the right to file appeals to higher instances. Previously it was impossible. It was possible only for minor infringements treated by magistrates.

“We also fought for the abolishment of the law which suggests a three year ‘trial period’ for young judges. According to this law, after three years superior judges gave recommendations (or didn’t do so) to their younger colleagues. In fact this system created a filter so that only ‘suitable’ candidates would pass to federal courts of law. So the staff of the courts was not at all formed in the way we would like it to be.

“The reaction to our proposal to change the criteria for police work assessment was also immediate: the president issued a law right away, he organized a series of meetings with law enforcement officials and explained the necessity of these changes… New orders kept coming in the past two years, and they were setting new criteria for the police work assessment. You understand that these criteria in theory define the level of corruption, abuse of power, torture, etc. existing within the police. And only changing the criteria could change the general state of affairs in this regard. The law was bettered for 3 or 4 times, but it still didn’t include one aspect of the problem: who would grant the independence of the experts assessing public opinion about police? I won’t list all our suggestions, but some of them were supported by the President. But I still had to turn the President’s attention to the fact that all these changes, important as they are, can’t resolve all the vises of our judicial and police systems, as we need systematic changes to do that, and not some fragmentary measures. 

“We need to introduce changes that would fit one school of law, we need to get rid of our ‘neo-Inquisition’ model and turn to a competitive one. And when we try to combine some competitive elements with the ‘Inquisition’ model... well, it’s like putting new parts into an old mechanism – it won’t work. I emphasized that despite all the changes in our laws, the real state of affairs is still grave. There’re still tortures and abuse of power in the police, they still force confessions, they falsify proof, while the courts close their eyes on the violations in the preliminary investigations. The courts ignore advocates’ cases, they refuse to grant the lawyers access to the document necessary for them to protect their clients. And when they file appeals to higher instances – sometimes 70 pages long – the higher courts just refuse them without explanation, they just recognize the ‘validity’ of the first court’s decision. All this can’t be changed till some radical changes are introduced. We need a systematic reform, and for that we need to create a special Center. The same can be said about the police. 

“It could probably be a single Center that would take up both judicial and police reforms. And this Center should be headed and staffed by people who really what the reform to work. We have an example of real reform. You probably remember when Sergei Pashin headed the Judicial Reform Department under the President. Back than some real progress was made, the only time when the reform was actually moving along. He introduced jury trials and many other efficient innovations, but then there was a rollback. That is why, I believe, we need such a center. I believe that this is the most topical issue in our country for now. We need a fair judicial system so that it would at last ensure justice, so that the courts would take fair decisions and so that all disputes could be settled in a civilized manner”.

Alexei Golovan’, the first ombudsman for the children’s rights under the President, a member of the Council, said that the topic of social rights of socially unprotected groups of citizens has always been an important part of our Council’s agenda. “Our group has made lots of proposals and put forward a lot of initiatives relating to the children’s rights protection, as well as to the protection of the rights of pregnant women, families with little children  and disabled people.

“We stated that a lot has been done in this regard, but we still have a lot to do. The issues related to the social rights of our citizens is an important part of the government’s work, so the President, when he becomes the Head of the government could attribute special attention to this issue. We are particularly proud of the fact that we managed to convince the President to sign the draft of the federal law on social control over the orphans’ rights observance. This project is already accepted in the first reading and now awaits the second one. This law stipulates that representatives of public organizations could monitor the situations in children’s houses and see to it that all their rights are observed. We also made a great progress in the protection of the housing rights of these kids, and it is important that we managed to start the implementation (only in the pilot form for now, however) of the mechanism protecting the social payments to the pregnant women and mothers of small children. We know that these allowances are often held back as the enterprises that have to pay them as they have the money. So these women become very vulnerable in the financial sense. We suggested that these payments were to be made directly by the Fund for Social Insurance. This mechanism is being implemented in two regions of Russia now, and we are cooperating with the Ministry of Health in this project. They help us monitor the progress of the pilot program so that in year and a half we could introduce it on the federal level, as the main mechanism of the allowances payments for the whole country.

“So if we are talking about socially insecure groups of our citizens, we have to stress two major groups of problems. First of all, it is the work with administrative cases related to the children’s or refugees’ or other unprotected groups’ of people problems to make them legal precedents for future similar cases. And we should systematically move towards joining all international conventions related to the subject in question. You see, we need to join not only the WTO, but also to join the global legal space to protect the rights of our citizens. And secondly, of course, we have to enhance our home laws to meet these international criteria. We have recently joined the UN convention of the rights of the disabled people, but you understand that until we modify our own laws to meet this convention it is nothing but an empty declaration, it won’t work”.