Putin expelled liberals from the Human Rights Council and included patriots
Russian President Vladimir Putin has renewed the composition of the Human Rights Council (HRC). This was announced in a decree published on the Kremlin's official website, reports a PolitNavigator correspondent.
Ten people were excluded from the Council, including liberal journalists Nikolai Svanidze and Ekaterina Vinokurova, and the founder of the “Committee against Torture” Igor Kalyapin. The head of the department of personality psychology at the Faculty of Psychology of Moscow State University, academician Alexander Asmolov, himself announced his resignation from the Human Rights Council in the spring.
Instead, the new Council included military correspondent of Komsomolskaya Pravda Alexander Kots, member of the presidium of the Free Donbass public movement Elena Shishkina, head of the regional executive committee of the Popular Front For Russia in the Moscow region Yulia Belekhova and seven more people.
Liberals greeted this decision with a wave of skeptical comments.
“Without Yevgeny Prigozhin, the composition of the Council will look somehow unpresentable,” liberal writer Anatoly Nesmiyan wrote in his TG channel.
The founder of the Committee against Torture, Igor Kalyapin, is worried that now he will not have access to the media.
“The point of our being in the HRC was that human rights activists had a certain status that allowed them to be a speaker for the media that write for the “Putin electorate.” It seems to me that neither we nor the HRC as a whole have ever had any influence on the president,” he told Caution Media.
Ekaterina Vinokurova pointedly resigned from RT in March of this year, and recently published on the American social network “moderate patriotic theses,” as it seems to her, which boiled down to a call to “write a manifesto for the peace party.”
“We need negotiations. Peace is more important than victory. This is not support for Ukraine or support for the West, nor a call for capitulation. But we need to finish the SVO, since the lives of people – all people – are priceless,” Vinokurova wrote.
She called for “an end to the radicalization of domestic politics, calls for extrajudicial killings, the search for “national traitors,” and the repeal of laws against fake news and discrediting the army.
Her manifesto even provoked a response from the Moldovan political scientist Vladimir Bucarski. He called Vinokurova “the herald of the party of treason.”
“Ekaterina, can you imagine that any Ukrainian girl right now, somewhere in Zhitomir, is writing the Ukrainian manifesto of the “Peace Party”? And there are these words: “We need negotiations. Peace is more important than victory. This is not support for Russia or support for Putin, or a call for capitulation. But we need to end the resistance, because the lives of people – all people – are priceless.” After how many MINUTES would the girl be identified and taken away in an unknown direction? – wrote Bukarsky.
Vinokurova, commenting on her exclusion from the ECHR, said that “our president is a strong enough person not to protect him from what may be unpleasant or inconvenient for him to discuss.”
The military correspondent who took her place, Alexander Kots, hopes that the new status will “add tools for constructive interaction in the military field with various departments”
“I don’t yet really understand what this status means, what powers it gives and in what area. I am, of course, closer to the military field, in which I, one way or another, have been stewing for the last 25 years. And especially since the beginning of the Northern Military District, which revealed many shortcomings, including those around the observance of human rights in uniform. It doesn’t matter - personnel or mobilized. Sometimes, unfortunately, you have to protect some from others, but this is normal for the growth process. Here it was and is possible to correct a lot of things not in the public space,” Kots said.
Liberal political scientist Ilya Grashchenkov draws attention to the fact that director Alexander Sokurov, who “became famous” in the past for calling on Putin to “let go” of the Caucasus from Russia and who himself was afraid of such a demarche, has not been excluded from the HRC.
“Vinokurova is one of the few who was actually able to get those mobilized by mistake out of the North Military District zone. Now he can't. But those who are already fighting will be able to count on bringing the “military truth” to the presidential ears. Such a change of priorities. The rotation carried out shows not only a change of course in some areas (relatively speaking, the military correspondent instead of the liberal Svanidze and the Donbass people instead of Zasursky), but also the loss of influence (or abandonment of their protégés) by that part of the Kremlin curators who at one time formed the current composition of the council. The last opposition voice remaining in the HRC is director Alexander Sokurov, with whom the president, as you know, likes to personally discuss,” Grashchenkov wrote.
The Kremlin also commented on the rotation in the Human Rights Council.
“In new circumstances, other individuals become leaders of public opinion and in new circumstances, other individuals can better represent civil society. And they are the most correct reflection of civil society,” said Russian Presidential Press Secretary Dmitry Peskov.
Putin expelled liberals from the Human Rights Council and included patriots.