Russia’s Ombudsman and one of the founders of the YABLOKO
party Vladimir Lukin published Report - 2009. The Report deals
with the most acute problems of human rights in Russia, provides
information on Ombudsman’s activities, including dealing with
citizens’ requests, interaction with the state bodes and civil
society institutes, analysis of the present law in the field
of human rights, as well as proposals on its further development.
The key factor determining the composition of Lukin’s Report
was the dynamics of developments in the field of human rights
in Russia.
Ombudsman studies the situation with human rights via a prism
of violations. Information on such violation comes from citizens’
applications and other sources (inspections of colonies and
prisons, military units, closed settlements, children’s orphanages,
psychiatric clinics and other institutions, non-governmental
human rights organisations, publications in the mass media,
etc.).
The goal of Ombudsman is to draw public and state attention
to the real problems in the human rights sphere, runs the
Report.
According to Vladimir Lukin, this task is urgent, as considerable
number of violations were of system-based and complex nature.
“System-based” violations include those arising from legislative
drawbacks or law enforcement practices. “Complex” violations
mean violations of several human rights in a single act by
a state power body or an official.
In his Report Vladimir Lukin replaced his favourite quotation
“law is stronger than the power” by another one “rights are
not give, rights are taken”. He made this after reading conclusions
from two “independent” experts from Novosibirsk who called
a placard with the same kind of slogan (“Freedom is not given,
it is taken”) a manifestation of extremism and call to a violent
change of the constitutional order.
“Such “experts’ conclusion” is very far from the truth. Both
the slogans have to convey to the Russian citizens a key message
that the prospects of democracy in our country depends on
the citizens, their active public stance, their decisiveness
to realise their constitutional rights and freedoms within
the framework of the present law. If this slogan is extremist,
than calls of many honourable citizens to more active formation
of civil society and the Russian Constitution should be found
extremist as well,” Lukin noted.
See also:
Ombudsman’s
Report (in Russian)
Human
Rights
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