Unpleasant topics

President Dmitry Medvedev met on November 23 with members of the Council for Promotion of Civil Society Institutions and Human Rights. The President spoke about pleasant things - he told the council members that he would introduce to the Duma a bill on socially-oriented non-profit organizations, which he spoke about in his address to the Federal Assembly. He then promised that these organizations would receive full support from the state, would be partially exempt from taxation, and charitable activities would be regulated. After a previous meeting with council members, Medvedev ordered the creation of a working group to improve legislation on non-profit organizations. The amendments concerned simplification of reporting procedures for small NPOs, limiting the list of documents requested from non-governmental organizations by authorities, as well as reducing the number of their inspections - the corresponding law has already been adopted and entered into force. Medvedev also promised to allocate 1.2 billion rubles this year to support the non-profit sector.

But Medvedev was told at the meeting about something unpleasant - about two people who each found themselves (one of them posthumously) at the center of the scandal: about Sergei Magnitsky, a lawyer for the Hermitage Capital Management investment fund, who died under unclear circumstances in a Moscow detention center, and about police major Alexei Dymovsky. In addition, the chairman of the “Civic Assistance” movement, Svetlana Gannushkina, brought to the meeting a poster with the image of Natalya Estemirova, a Memorial employee killed in Chechnya.

The head of the Council, Ella Pamfilova, noted that a catchphrase has already appeared: sudden death in a pre-trial detention center is almost like an occupational disease of Russian entrepreneurs. “This is a terrible tragedy when a 37-year-old lawyer dies without yet being recognized as a criminal, but only under investigation,” Pamfilova noted. According to some reports, the cause of Magnitsky’s death was the failure to provide him with proper medical care. The capital's department of the Investigative Committee under the prosecutor's office does not yet see any grounds for initiating a criminal case.

At the same time, when Pamfilova, listing high-profile crimes of recent times, noted that the murder of priest Daniil Sysoev “from a different sphere,” Medvedev noted that it is not worth dividing crimes depending on the degree of public resonance. “There cannot be a murder from another sphere. Any murder - a human rights activist, a journalist, a priest, a policeman - has absolutely the same social consequences for society,” he said.

The story with the video revelations of Major Dymovsky became an occasion for Council members to talk about the situation in the Russian Ministry of Internal Affairs as a whole. Pamfilova emphasized that strengthening the law enforcement system will not lead to anything good, and it must be modernized through improvement. “The scale of public support for fundamental reform of law enforcement that exists today provides a unique opportunity,” she said.

Medvedev, for his part, called on human rights activists to unite with the authorities in order to increase the authority of the judicial system. Because criticism is criticism, they say, but there is no civilized alternative to going to court. This is how he reacted to Pamfilova’s words that people perceive the call to go to court as a mockery, and the courts themselves as a dead end.

Pamfilova suggested that Medvedev hold a separate meeting of the Council in connection with the situation in the Caucasus, to which he replied that this was “not a bad idea,” and for his part proposed to invite to the corresponding meeting those human rights activists who work directly in the region.