The UN Human Rights Council (HRC) extended the mandate of the Special Rapporteur on human rights in Russia for another year. The meeting was broadcast on the HRC website.
The position of Special Rapporteur on Russia was created in October 2022 in response to the increasing repression in the country. For the first time in history, the Human Rights Council created the mandate of the Special Rapporteur for a country that is a permanent member of the UN Security Council. This decision was made due to long-term and ongoing human rights violations and the need for an international response to this situation.
It was only in May 2023 that a candidate was elected to the post – Mariana Katsarova. The Russian authorities refused to cooperate with her, believing that the Special Rapporteur “would act in accordance with Western guidelines in order to exert political pressure on Moscow.”
Despite this, Katsarova released a report in which she analyzed long-term systematic violations of human rights in Russia and formulated recommendations for the authorities. In this report, the Special Rapporteur used data from OVD-Info.
In addition, she consulted with Russian civil society, took part in a webinar with OVD-Info lawyer Violetta Finzer, issued several press releases on the human rights situation in Russia, for example, dedicated to the persecution of Oleg Orlov , Vladimir Kara Murza , as well as the decisions of the Constitutional Court of the Russian Federation on complaints against the administrative article on discrediting the army (Article 20.3.3 of the Code of Administrative Offenses).
"Mariana Katsarova took up this position and started working only in May of this year. In just a few months, she has done a huge amount of work, analyzing years of systematic human rights violations. Her first report marked the beginning of a long process of documenting violations, without which no changes in the future are possible. Of course, a few months are not enough to study all the violations - it is not for nothing that the authorities have been trying for years and introducing more and more repressions. Therefore, it is very important that today her mandate has been extended, and Russian civil society has the opportunity to further interact with the Special Rapporteur," noted lawyer Violetta Fitzner.
- Mariana Katsarova was born in Bulgaria, where she worked as a journalist and wrote about the problems of the penitentiary system. She worked as a researcher in the armed conflict zones of Chechnya, Bosnia and Kosovo, and led Amnesty International's investigations in Russia for 10 years. Katsarova also created the RAW in WAR Foundation and established the Anna Politkovskaya Prize for human rights defenders and journalists. In 2014-2016, Katsarova headed the UN Human Rights Monitoring Mission in Donbas, and in 2021-2022 she studied the human rights situation in Belarus as part of her work at the UN.