Human Rights in Russia week-ending 18 June 2021 - with Yulia Fedotova

Simon and Sergei

This week our guest on the podcast is Yulia Fedotova, a lawyer with a PhD in law from the city of Ekaterinburg.

The issues discussed in the podcast include: the legal profession; legal specialization; the Russian judicial system; successful legal cases; major human rights problems in Russia today; the role of the European Court of Human Rights; the recent constitutional amendments; Russia and the Council of Europe; and the future of human rights in Russia.

This podcast is in Russian. You can also listen to the podcast on our website 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: "Since childhood I was attracted to the criminal law, and I actually wanted to become a police investigator. But I couldn't accept a compromise with my conscience, work from 9 am for as long as they wanted and obey orders. So after an internship I changed my plans: I became a lawyer. A human rights lawyer." - these are the words of our interviewee this week, Yulia Fedotova, a lawyer with a PhD in law from the city of Ekaterinburg. In addition to her work in the capital of the Urals federal district, Yulia manages to work in Krasnodar region. In our conversation she interestingly compares the state of justice in these two regions, figuratively describing the law enforcement system of the sunny southern region as "like a big ball of snakes kissing." Her words are confirmed by two incidents when courts in Krasnodar tried to frame Yulia herself as a member of an organization the Russian authorities have been coquettishly calling "undesirable.' Yulia has filed fifty-three applications to the European Court of Human Rights (of which the court deemed 17 inadmissible, but accepted the rest) and has won many cases in the domestic courts. Fedotova is sharp-tongued, saying that a lawyer in today's Russia could be compared to someone diving to the depths of the Marianna Trench with a broken aqua-lung in bloody faeces. Simon Cosgrove and I listened with great interest to Yulia, and you can hear her stories, including how a nine-day sentence for Evgeny Roizman turned into one day thanks to the efforts of our interviewee."

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 https://rightsinrussia.org/week-ending-18-june-2021."