In this eternal squabble to catch

The head of the Moscow Helsinki Group, Lyudmila Alekseeva, announced that she is finally leaving the Presidential Council for Human Rights. She told RIA Novosti that she had already notified the head of the council, Mikhail Fedotov, about her decision. Previously, Alekseeva stated that she was suspending her membership in the council, but was ready to return if she was satisfied with the new composition. She participated in the candidate selection procedure. Now, “squabbles” and “intrigues” around the selection forced her to finally leave. “My application has been there for a long time, but I promised that I would go through the entire procedure of forming the lists, but it became so disgusting that I decided to do it earlier,” Alekseeva said. Indeed, there are already enough scandals - just look at the hunger strike of the director of the Moscow Bureau for Human Rights, Alexander Brod, who was offended that his candidacy was rejected. However, the main dubious element in the whole story with the formation of a new composition of the council is the fact that the main and only voter, as Fedotov put it, will be Putin. On the one hand, of course, the council is presidential, not public. On the other hand, Putin will thus select those with whom he wants to talk. The extent to which the resulting composition will truly represent the human rights community or at least people really interested in protecting human rights is a big question.

Let us recall that earlier the Council for the Development of Civil Society and Human Rights was left by journalist Svetlana Sorokina and public figure Irina Yasina (this happened after the Duma elections), director of the Russian branch of Transparency International Elena Panfilova, and political scientist Dmitry Oreshkin (before the so-called inauguration of Putin), President of the Institute of the National Project "Social Contract" Alexander Auzan, Head of the Glasnost Defense Foundation Alexey Simonov, Journalist Leonid Radzikhovsky, Head of the Center for Ethnopolitical and Regional Studies Emil Pain, Head of the Institute for Humanitarian Development of the Megapolis Tatyana Maleeva, Head of the Center for the Development of Democracy and Human Rights Georgy Dzhibladze and Head human rights organization "Civil Assistance" Svetlana Gannushkina. Already after a new system for forming a council based on online voting was announced, Alekseeva, as well as the director of the Institute of Human Rights Valentin Gefter, human rights activist Boris Pustyntsev and the chairman of the board of the Institute of Contemporary Development, vice-president of the Russian Union of Industrialists and Entrepreneurs Igor, announced their resignation Jurgens. All of them later announced that they would still work on the Council. Alekseeva was the first to break down.