“Cats in raincoats”: interview with member of the PSC of St. Petersburg Ekaterina Kosarevskaya

Is it so difficult to become a member of the PMC that a whole project to help candidates is needed?

Our idea is precisely that becoming a member of the PMC is easier than being a member of the POC ( grins ). Anti-advertising.

From the outside it seems that the PMCs are such special guys, members of something departmental, the Public Chamber (PC), the Human Rights Council. And I don’t know what it takes to be a human rights activist for the last 40 years, to be born under the table of a human rights organization.

In fact, to become a member of the POC, you need to satisfy a not very long list of formal criteria: be unconvicted or have an expunged criminal record, not have relatives in prison, not be a security officer, not be a lawyer, and then get together and submit documents. One of the main goals of our campaign is to convey to potential members of the POC that all this is not difficult. The second goal is to help with bureaucracy and paperwork.

How is the POC formed? People who are in one way or another related to human rights, human rights-related or charitable work - formally, in reality these could be former security officials - get acquainted with some organization, take a package of documents and send them to the OP. Next, the OP checks whether the documents are drawn up correctly, and then also looks at who really deserves to be a member of the PMC.

Three years ago it became clear that the OP is more likely to select those who will not be good members of the PMC, and at least weed out those who were good members of the PMC before. Who knows that he will create difficulties for structures that violate the rights of prisoners.

For example, in the Chelyabinsk region Tatyana and Nikolai Shchur were not accepted into the fourth convocation. The Public Chamber said that they lack experience in human rights work. And at the same time, they have two convocations of the Public Monitoring Committee, an investigation into the so-called riot in Kopeisk, which began due to torture.

What's all this for? Moreover, this selection occurs in a rather opaque manner. I'd like to see how it works. It would seem that the decisions of the Public Chamber should be made in a manner open to society. From July 20 to September 20, our goal is to help draw up documents and tell them that the POC exists and it would be good to join it. And then we will see how the selection will take place.

How did the idea for the project come about?

I was a member of the PMC of the fourth convocation, which is now ending, and during the recruitment of the third convocation I was 22 and I could not yet get into the PMC. But together with Yashka (member of the POC Yana Teplitskaya - OVD-Info ) we really wanted the PMC in St. Petersburg to be active and consist of some adequate people. We went around and told everyone about this mechanism, got acquainted with organizations that could nominate candidates to the PMC, and did a lot of this. That’s how, by the way, we met Azaria, who later nominated us. Now, six years later, they simply remembered the skills.

I realized that we needed to work on a new convocation in St. Petersburg, because many people who in some way helped us began to say that they wanted to join. And simply because no one is doing it, it needs to be done.

] Dima Makarov and Sasha Krylenkova came up to me [Human rights activists - OVD-Info and said: “Let’s start recruiting PSCs for 42 regions.” I found this very tempting. It was practically the same thing that I was going to do in St. Petersburg, the technical instructions were almost the same, the work with organizations was the same, only more global. And almost immediately, Open Space coordinator Ilya Ershov got involved, with whom, among other things, we are doing everything now.

Are local Public Chambers involved in recruitment to regional PMCs?

People for the PMC are recruited by the federal OP. And that's not so bad. In the regions, local OPs know very well who should not be accepted into the PSC. And in Moscow, those who will become a great member of the PMC, who will defend the rights of prisoners, may not be noticed, and they will be allowed through.