Mary Page talks with Dmitry Makarov, a leading human rights activist with the Moscow Helsinki Group. Dmitry has worked as co-chair of the Moscow Helsinki Group and as that organisation’s programme coordinator. He has also worked previously as a member of the Coordinating Council of the international Youth Human Rights Movement, based in Voronezh. He was also one of the initiators of Legal Team, a group providing legal support for grass root activist groups. He has regularly run training courses on human rights, advocacy and campaigning in Russia and the countries of the former Soviet Union. The Moscow Helsinki Group is Russia’s oldest human rights organisation, originally founded by Soviet dissidents in 1976 to monitor fulfilment by the Soviet government of the 1975 Helsinki Accords.
