Prisoners’ Rights
29/11/2016
New rosters of Public Monitoring Commissions (PMC), Russia’s only independent prison watchdog, were released on 21 October1Public Monitoring Commissions roster, published on the website […]
18/01/2017
The bill outlining use of physical force, special technical devices and firearms on convicts was signed by President Putin on 29 December 2016. It […]
21/09/2018
We interviewed the leaders of the European Prison Litigation Network (EPLN), a leading organization that advocates for prisoners’ rights in broader Europe: Hugues de Suremain, lawyer, EPLN’s co-founder and legal coordinator, and Julia Krikorian, its coordinator of the development.
15/03/2019
Roman Kachanov, executive director of the Interregional Human Rights Center (IHRC) in Yekaterinburg, speaks about his group’s legal victories, which have gradually removed some of the unlawful barriers preventing lawyers from gaining entry to correctional facilities and meeting with their clients.
07/04/2020
We know little about the lives of convicted women in Russia as a whole, and even less about the lives of convicted women in the North Caucasus. Crime is considered a huge disgrace for families in the region, and so the difficulties faced by ex-convicts are not discussed.
28/05/2020
On March 11, 2020, the World Health Organization announced the COVID-19 to be a pandemic. Most countries including Russia have taken measures to combat coronavirus, and some of these measures have also affected the judicial system. But are they consistent with the country's fair trial obligations under international law?
09/08/2020
What is the internet? A means or an end? How do we define the right to access the internet? Is it an autonomous human right, or does it augment other rights protected by the European Convention on Human Rights?
31/03/2021
At the outset of the COVID-19 pandemic in the spring of 2020, it seemed that we were all equally vulnerable to the coronavirus, which did not discriminate by gender, ethnicity, social status or income. Politicians said that we were all in the same boat. It soon became apparent, however, that this was not entirely true.
27/01/2022
Elena Shakhova is the Chair of Citizens' Watch, a human rights NGO in St. Petersburg, and a Board Member of the EU-Russia Civil Society Forum. In a special interview for Legal Dialogue, Elena speaks to journalist Vladimir Shvedov about the situation with human rights in places of detention in Russia and how the pandemic has changed things and discusses a highly sensitive issue for Russian civil society today, the law on "foreign agents."