Human Rights in Russia week-ending 7 May 2021 - with Tatyana Glushkova

Simon and Sergei

This week our guest on the podcast is Tatiana Glushkova. Tatiana is a lawyer with Memorial Human Rights Centre, a member of the programme, Human Rights Protection Using International Mechanisms, a member of the coordinating council of the Project to Provide Legal Aid to Transgender People and of the board of the ‘Stumul’ LGBT group.

The questions discussed in the podcast include: what it means to be a human rights lawyer in Russia today; what led Tatyana Glushkova to take up this work; the workload and pace of work; the main human rights issues in Russia today; the right to freedom of association in Russia; the law on foreign agents; the application to the European Court of Human Rights regarding the law on foreign agents; the role of the ECtHR in Russia; the significance of last year’s constitutional amendments; Russia and the Council of Europe; the future of human rights in Russia.

You can also listen to the podcast on our website [https://www.rightsinrussia.org/category/podcasts/] or on SoundCloud, Spotify and iTunes.

The music, from Stravinsky’s Elegy for Solo Viola, is performed for us by Karolina Herrera.

Sergei Nikitin writes on Facebook: “My entry into human rights work was, by and large, an accident. Having experience in a commercial legal structure, after graduating from Moscow State University I decided to find something different from what I had encountered during my years of study. The story of a friend about the non-profit organisation JURIX caught my attention. I was lucky – there was a vacancy and I went to join Anita Karlovna Soboleva and her team. I found the job much more interesting than working in a commercial firm.” Last week Simon and I spoke with Tatiana Glushkova, a lawyer in the programme ‘Human Rights Protection Using International Mechanisms’ at Memorial Human Rights Centre, where she is also a board member. Cases she has worked with range from summary executions in Chechnya to LGBT rights. “In Russia today there is so much work for human rights lawyers that the situation can be figuratively compared to patching up one hole while two new ones appear. And so on,” Tatiana told us. “You can do a tremendous amount of work, collect all the evidence, and the result will not be different from if you had done nothing at all.” But Tatyana Glushkova finds the strength to carry on her work: she is well known in the human rights world as a successful lawyer who works 25 or even 48 hours a day. It was very interesting for us to talk to Tatiana, and it’s great that she was able to find time to talk to us as well.“

Simon Cosgrove adds: "If you want to listen to this podcast on the podcasts.com website and it doesn’t seem to play, please download by clicking on the three dots to the right. A summary of some of the week’s events in Russia relevant to human rights can be found on our website here."