We believe the voices of Russia’s human rights defenders should be more widely heard internationally, both by civil society and by governments. We wish to address a continuing shortage of accurate information in English about human rights in Russia. We want to offer our support and solidarity to Russia’s human rights defenders at a time when the Russian government’s indifference and hostility often places their work and their lives in jeopardy.

Rights in Russia has four main goals: 1) to provide information about human rights in Russia in English; 2) to promote international discussion and debate about human rights in Russia; 3) to act as a channel by which the voices of Russian human rights defenders and human rights organizations can reach an audience outside Russia; and 4) to promote knowledge of, and contacts with, Russian human rights groups.

In pursuit of our objectives, at present we run four web-based projects:

1) Human Rights in Russia: providing news, views and analysis about human rights in Russia, including translations of articles by Russian human rights defenders, and articles by experts living outside Russia;

2) HRO.org in English: publishing translations from Russia's premier human rights website, HRO.org;

3) Internet Freedom in Russia: publishing translations produced in the course of a project by Agora Human Rights Association to monitor and protect freedom of the Internet in Russia today;

4) Human Rights Groups in Russia: providing information from and about human rights groups in Russia.

Readers can subscribe to our publications by e-mail, and they are also available on Facebook, Twitter, WordPress, Blogger, and LiveJournal.

Today our publications are among the top items for Google searches about human rights in Russia and reach approximately 5,000 readers each month. We are a small organization with low administrative costs that remains committed to the value of voluntary work in advancing human rights. Yet, as we work to reach a wider audience, to increase our output of quality translations, and to bring a wider range of authors to public attention, we need to raise significantly the level of our funding. This is now the next goal in our development. 

For more information, please contact Simon Cosgrove, director of Rights in Russia at simon@rightsinrussia.info.

Some of the human rights defenders whose views are published by Rights in Russia

From left to right: Ludmila Alekseeva (Moscow Helsinki Group); Svetlana Gannushkina (Civic Assistance); Pavel Chikov (Agora Human Rights Association); Igor Kaliapin (Committee Against Torture); Arseny Roginsky (International Memorial Society); Lev Ponomarev (For Human Rights); Karinna Moskalenko (Centre for International Protection).