There appears to be a new potential employer for all the human-rights motivated Russia-watchers out there: the "Institute of Democracy and Cooperation."
Anatoly Kucherena, the director, has stated the goal of the new, Kremlin-backed (although not Kremlin-funded) organization to be "to monitor the observance of human rights in different countries and develop methods of perfecting civil society institutions." Wait, that sounds like the mission of Freedom House. Apparently not: "I have no desire to copy the behavior of organizations like Freedom House . . . . We have completely different tasks. . . . Freedom House has only one goal: to publish data, which was assembled using methodologies that nobody understands, in order to draw attention to themselves."
So, the question remains, what exactly will this organization be doing? In the words of Putin - 'to set up a think tank for freedom and democracy . . . [that] counters the activity of Western nongovernmental organizations operating in Russia." Ah, that makes more sense. It seems that the battle over "truthiness" has escalated.
Jan 14, 2008
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2 comments:
Well it's about damn time the Kremlin put out some "truthiness" on it's human rights record.
I believe that the following information is important for understanding the context within which the ‘Institute for Democracy and Cooperation’ was established. The initial impulse for creating this institute came from Vladimir Putin’s comments made at Russia – EU conference in Portugal in October 2007. In his comments, Mr Putin referred to EU-funded advocacy of democracy in Russia as to something that should be matched by Russia’s similar activities in Europe and elsewhere. When explaining these comments, Putin’s aide Sergei Yastrzhembsky said that Mr Putin meant the European University at St. Petersburg that received a EU grant to implement a project on election monitoring in Russia. As a director of the mentioned project, the Inter-Regional Electoral Network of Assistance (IRENA), I would like to draw the attention of your readers to the following facts. Starting with June 2007, the IRENA project experienced continuous harassment from the Russian authorities. After a series of inspections that did not prove anything illegal in project-related activities, the Russian authorities attacked the recipient of the grant, the European University at St. Petersburg. In February 2008, the European University was closed by the authorities on a ridiculous pretext of ‘fire safety violations’. At about the same time, the ‘Institute for Democracy and Cooperation’ started to operate in Paris and New York.
Grigorii Golosov, Professor, European University at St. Petersburg, Russia
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