Professor Bill Bowring’s guest this week on “25 Questions” is Valery Borshchev, a human rights activist and head of the Social Partnership Foundation, based in Moscow. Valery Borshchev is also co-chair of the Moscow Helsinki Group. He was a Soviet-era dissident who was a member of the Committee for the Protection of the Rights of Believers. He was a member of the State Duma from 1994 to 1999. In particular, he was active in combating human rights abuses during the conflict in Chechnya and was one of the initiators of the 2008 law on public oversight that created a national network of regional public oversight commissions with powers to review conditions in places of detention and hear complaints from those detained. In 2009 as chair of the POC in Moscow he led the work of the independent investigation into the death of Sergei Magnitsky that found Magnitsky had been killed while held in pre-trial detention. The video of the interview can be viewed on YouTube and below.
