The Public Chamber did not include journalist Eva Merkacheva, Igor Kalyapin and other human rights activists in the new composition of the POC

The Public Chamber approved new compositions in 43 regions. Moskovsky Komsomolets columnist Eva Merkacheva, who was part of the capital’s Public Monitoring Committee, noticed that she herself, as well as other journalists and human rights activists, were not included in the lists.

“A huge number of real human rights defenders have applied to join the new PMC. Not one (!) of them passed,” writes Merkacheva.

The new commissions did not include the founder of the “Team Against Torture” Igor Kalyapin, the director of the Moscow Helsinki Group Svetlana Astrakhantseva, the co-chairman of the organization Valery Borshchev and the former secretary of the Moscow Public Monitoring Committee Ivan Melnikov.

Moskovsky Komsomolets journalist Ekaterina Sazhneva, and former Izvestia columnist Boris Klin, who was a member of the Moscow Public Monitoring Committee, were not accepted into the Moscow region commission.

At the same time, in the Kirov region, as Merkacheva notes, the new composition included the former chairman of the commission, priest Vladimir Putintsev, and members of the previous compositions Vladimir Tashirev and Sergei Bronnikov.

After a visit to the colonies of the region in 2021 by members of the Presidential Council for Human Rights, Putintsev refused to check the prisoners’ complaints of torture and rape. Tashirev and Bronnikov, according to the journalist, in exchange for insulin, demanded that Kirov convicts with diabetes “calm down” the prisoner who was complaining about the conditions.