Russia

Russian President Vladimir Putin has signed into law new legislative amendments targeting the independent media and fostering media censorship. Civil Rights Defenders strongly condemns the intensified...

The opening ceremony of the ninth QueerFest, supported by Civil Rights Defenders, was a success from start to finish. For the second year in a row, the festival could open without disruptions of viole...

Civil Rights Defenders welcomes the decision of the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) which ruled that Russian special forces were directly involved in the kidnapping of Oleg Orlov, the then-head...

Civil Rights Defenders is seriously concerned with public threats made by a high-ranking government official in Chechnya against Grigoriy Shvedov, editor-in-chief of the independent news portal Caucas...

On 22 November, an essay was launched by the Foreign Policy Centre (UK) compiled by an anonymous Human Rights Defender from Chechnya in cooperation with Civil Rights Defenders about the repressions fa...

On 26 October, the Supreme Court of the Russian Federation will consider the appeal by human rights lawyers Ms Marina Dubrovina and Mr Dokka Itslaev of the special ruling by a judge of the Supreme Cou...

In its eight year history as one of Russia’s largest LGBTI festivals, QueerFest has been marred by violence, hate speech, harassment of participants and forced venue cancellations by the authorities. ...

Anna Politkovskaya worked as a journalist at the investigative paper Novaya Gazeta and was internationally famous for her reports about human rights abuses in warn-torn Chechnya. On 7 October 2006 she...

Civil Rights Defenders is delighted to support the 8th International Queer Festival – “QueerFest 2016” —which began yesterday in St. Petersburg and will run until September 25. The Festival aims to pr...

Sunday’s parliamentary elections to the Russian Duma are held in a more repressive climate than ever, since the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991. Freedom of Expression, Association and Assembly as wel...