Our guest this week is Pavel Chikov, the well-known lawyer, human rights activist and public figure who is head of Agora International Human Rights Group. He lives in Kazan. In this podcast we discuss issues of strategic litigation and what distinguishes successful court practice from unsuccessful; Agora’s priorities in litigation; the degree of independence of Russian courts; the regulatory framework for NGOs in Russia and the impact of the law on “foreign agents”; the recent constitutional changes; the role of the European Court of Human Rights in Russia; the attractiveness of working in the field of human rights for young lawyers; events in Khabarovsk and Belarus; and the future of human rights in Russia.
This podcast is in the Russian language. You can listen to it here:
You can also listen on Podcasts.com, SoundCloud, Spotify or iTunes.
The music, from Stravinsky’s Elegy for Solo Viola, is performed for us by Karolina Herrera.
Sergei Nikitin writes on Facebook: Everyone knows Chikov. Well, almost everybody. So that even more people get to know him better, Simon Cosgrove and I talked to Pavel. We had a very interesting conversation. Pavel Chikov talked about what success in the world of human rights lawyering is and about the cases on which Agora’s lawyers are working. We discussed a great deal apart from legal issues: about the fact that human rights vocabulary is not very clear to ordinary citizens, about how almost a thousand cases are handled by Apology of Protest, a specialised group set up by Agora, and about Agora’s work protecting activists, bloggers, journalists and NGOs. In 2015 the Agora Interregional Association of Human Rights Organizations, which had existed since 2005, was transformed into the Agora International Human Rights Group, with Pavel Chikov at its head. Listen to our conversation, I’m sure you’ll find it very interesting.
Simon Cosgrove adds: If you want to listen to this podcast on the podcasts.com website and it doesn’t seem to play, please download by clicking on the three dots to the right. A summary of some of the week’s events in Russia relevant to human rights can be found on our website here.
