10 December 2021
by Liubov Mosseeva-Helier, legal adviser, human rights defender, recipient of the Moscow Helsinki Group prize
Source: Moscow Helsinki Group [original source: 7х7 blog]
This was, of course, my day – but I didn’t especially prepare for it.
The “gifts” I received were all the more valuable for it. It was an eventful day.
At 10am I was supposed to listen to a lecture on strategic planning, but instead I had to finish some household chores from the day before relating to hot water supply.
It was only at 11am that I joined the Institute of Law and Public Policy’s Zoom conference.
The lecture “The system of the European Convention on Human Rights” was given by Egbert Myjer, Professor Emeritus of Human Rights Law at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, judge of the European Court of Human Rights (retired) and a commissioner with the International Commission of Jurists.
Listening to Egbert is always a delight!
The presenter was Tamara Georgievna Morshchakova, a former judge of the Constitutional Court of the Russian Federation.
Nuala Mole, founder and senior lawyer at the UK’s AIRE Centre (Advice on Individual Rights in Europe) gave a talk “On the role of Article 53 of the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) and relations between the Convention and other international state obligations”.
It was a very interesting and unexpected insight on the topic. Nuala gave quite a few examples of the European Court of Human Rights invoking Article 53 of the ECHR. I was inspired to delve into the HUDOC database.
Başak Çalı, Doctor of Law, Professor of International Law and Director of the Centre for Fundamental Human Rights at the Hertie School in Berlin, Germany, then gave an address “On dishonesty and the ECHR”.
It was an intellectual feast – even though the speakers were completely unknown to me.
But at 13:00 the Moscow Helsinki Group invited me to their conference, and I stayed there until the evening. After all, by then I was among people I’ve known for a very long time.
I was interested to hear more about judicial monitoring, and the work of virtual human rights reception rooms (such as was conducted by Lev Levinson).
I enjoyed Dmitry Makarov’s words about the “human rights ghetto” into which the authorities are pushing us. Dmitry rightly posed the question of the relationship with regional human rights defenders and spoke about a recent study of human rights reception rooms, most of which employ singular elderly human rights defenders. I liked the Voronezh House of Human Rights’ proposal on the use of CRM technology.
The Ryazan Human Rights reception complained that it is lacking two or three young lawyers.
I was glad that the Moscow Helsinki Group presented a strategic plan for the future – a human rights agenda for work until 2026. That gives us something to guide our work for those of us in the regions.
Translated by Elizabeth Rushton
