Mary Page talks with Grigory Vaypan, a human rights lawyer based in Moscow. Grigory Vaypan is a graduate of Moscow State University, Harvard Law School, and St. Petersburg State University. He has also been a Galina Starovoitova Fellow at the Kennan Institute in Washington. He has worked at the Institute for Law and Public Policy, a nonprofit based in Moscow, where he has been involved in developing nonprofit jurisprudence related to human rights cases before the Constitutional Court. In addition, in a recent report written by Grigory Vaypan for the International Federation for Human Rights (FIDH), entitled ‘Russia: Crimes Against History,’ Grigory has written about ‘how the Russian state monopolizes history.’ He notes that ‘Russia is one of the countries that has passed the largest number of laws suppressing freedom of expression on historical issues.’ At present Grigory is one of the lawyers representing Memorial at the Russian Supreme Court in the lawsuit brought by prosecutors to close down one of Russia’s leading human rights NGOs. The video can be seen in full on YouTube or below.
