Defending Human Rights in Russia

...Like the Lawyers' Committee, his organization's financial support comes mainly from Western sources that include the European Union and Tacis (a German human right foundation...

...Political prisoners and refuseniks he has defended over the past decades can attest to how little impact Leonid I. Brezhnev's signature on the Helsinki Accords had on their day to day lives...

...The free market is a "natural, normal condition," he told the assemblage of leading financiers and industrialists, while vowing to strengthen private property legislation in Russia...

...But its prospect has spurred the rights groups to step up their activities...

...Although the Duma does not have prosecutorial powers, it is yet CHARLES DIGGES, a first-time contributor to these pages, is a political correspondent for the St...

...Gorbachev...

...But they turned a deaf ear to those pleas...

...With its current representation in the Duma (and without the threat of an executive veto), the Communist bloc would need only lukewarm backing from nationalists to muster a simple majority for the adoption of its proposals...

...Having a national infrastructure that was left largely untouched by the trial of the 1991 coup conspirators, the CPRF has been able to drown out the new, less recognizable, mostly democratic voices...

...The Supreme Court refused to consider Schmidt's appeal of acity court's decision to restrict Mazarsky's movement, insisting that determining whether information is classified was outside its jurisdiction...

...The case of Aleksandr Nikitin, a Russian employed by the Norwegian environmental organization Bellona, illustrates Schmidt's point...

...Petersburg Times...

...Unlike the father of glasnost andpere-stroika, though, Zyuganov and his minions owe their success at home to Bolshevik catchphrases and nationalist (or "patriotic," to use their euphemism) slogans...

...Next, Citizen's Action began a crash program to translate the United States Freedom of Information Act and the American Civil Liberties Union's book, Your Right to Government Information...

...The Committee, whose services are offered pro bono, handles individual and class action cases involving political prisoners...

...Immediately after being installed, hardline deputies formed a subcommittee with a Communist/nationalist majority to review and assign blame for the effects of privatization...

...Before he was born, in 1938, his father was exiled to Siberia for anti-Bolshevik activities and held incommunicado until his release in 1956, when father and son met for the first time...

...Party leaders were exhorted to "Observe your own Constitution...

...Since even now his files have begun reading like the contents of a time capsule, Schmidt hesitates to contemplate what will happen to civil and human rights in Russia if a Communist regime is reinstalled in the Kremlin after all...

...Should a Communist government bear too striking a resemblance to its namesake, Schmidt will probably find himself having to go back to basics...

...That yesterday's rhetoric still strikes a deep chord was demonstrated in December: Nearly two thirds of the electorate turned out and gave 45 per cent of the 450-seat Duma to a bloc of parties led by the CPRF, which alone won 158 seats...

...detailed the practice...

...In the interim, the FSB appointed one of its own lawyers as defense counsel and demanded that Schmidt submit to phone taps and mail surveillance if he wanted to take over, necessitating his appeal to the Constitutional Court...

...Their respective parliamentary campaigns were essentially identical, evoking images of a great power humiliated...

...Proving his point, the majority of journalists at the press conference admitted that many of the constitutional guarantees he mentioned were news to them...

...But there is no mistaking the punitive mood of the CPRF and its cohorts, he says, or the threat they pose to Russia's fragile civil and human rights...

...Four and a half years after the collapse of Communism, not a month goes by without the Lawyers' Committee receiving requests for help from individuals denied exit visas because their past employment dealt with once sensitive, but now obsolete or no longer secret information...

...Western analysts, they maintain, tend to downplay the likely consequences of an ultimate Communist victory in this spring's presidential election, largely because party leader Gennadi A. Zyuganov's deceptively reasonable statements—mostly for foreign consumption —are taken at face value...

...Neither Pustintsev nor Schmidt expects the two camps to stay separate if the Russian people finally elect a Communist President...

...In the late 1950s, when the human rights campaigns began, their limited goal was realizing the basic freedoms—of speech, movement and access to information—that served as window dressing in the Soviet Constitution...

...If history repeats itself, safeguarding fundamental rights will depend on blocking Communist efforts to circumvent, or rewrite, the 1993 Constitution...

...Pustintsev puts tentative faith in Russia's admission to the European Council...

...At a press conference accompanying the release of the ACLU book in Russian, Pustintsev explained that most citizens are unacquainted with the rights guaranteed them under the 1993 Constitution, especially those dealing with access to information and freedom of speech...

...Nor would they be any the wiser, he added, if a Communist regime were to launch an assault on civil liberties...

...ALL THAT, of course, is a worst-case scenario...

...If Zyuganov triumphs, Schmidt envisions reactionary and self-interested change...

...At Davos, many in the Communist candidate's audience reportedly arrived at a similar conclusion about him...

...Petersburg-based group...

...Not surprisingly, Schmidt and Pustintsev worry that should Zyuganov prevail, his regime would exploit the chaos it will inherit—a legacy of the all-at-once reforms of the early '90s, whose poor execution has bred widespread skepticism of change...

...The action was a clear violation of Article 29of the 1993 Constitution, providing for a free press, yet it elicited no public outcry...

...If his hope was to make the same impression Mikhail S. Gorbachev made on Margaret Thatcher when the two first met in 1984, he apparently did...

...Indeed, no statute exists that clearly defines what constitutes "classified" information...

...PETERSBURG WITH THE COMMUNIST landslide in Russia's parliamentary election last December, rights activists here began to think about what had become unthinkable just four years earlier: a Communist in the Kremlin again and their own retreat to the underground committee rooms of the bad old days...

...As matters stand, Russian law makes no provision for the eventual release of classified government records...

...to address the CPRF's intrinsic advantages as successor to the Communist Party of the Soviet Union...

...Another instance of "the gap between intention and implementation" contributing to the chaos in Russia, says Schmidt, is the election law...

...Whoever heads the next government is expected to seek amendments to the election law...

...Lest anyone miss the message, Victor Anpilov of the affiliated Working Russia Party speaks openly of a map that will once more have "USSR" emblazoned across it...

...Ul-tranationalist Vladimir V Zhirinovsky's so-called Liberal Democratic Party lost votes to the bloc but held on to 51 seats...

...Yuri Schmidt, chairman of the Russian Lawyers' Committee in the Defense of Human Rights, wishes this was the only resemblance between the new Communists and the old...

...The Federal Security Service (FSB, the recast KGB) arrested Nikitin last February 6. He was charged with espionage for giving Bellona data on Russian radioactive waste dumping at sea—even though a publicly available report by Yeltsin's ecological adviser, Aleksandr Yablokov...

...Juries have been rare, since the excuse that Soviet-era courtrooms do not easily accommodate them is readily available...

...By turning a blind eye to nationalist violence and propaganda, the Communists could intimidate the reformist opposition without lifting a finger...

...Schmidt hesitates to prophesy a subsequent Stalinist reign of terror, but he knows the Communists' proclivities...

...The comparative ease with which Yeltsin sacked the chairman of Moscow's state controlled TV-6 station last February, for a history of unfavorably reporting the Chechen war and of criticizing the beleaguered President, brought the issue into sharp focus...

...As part of an overall strategy to reassert Russia's greatness, the "new" Communist Party of the Russian Federation (CPRF) platform calls for reunification with Belarus and a "military-political union" throughout the Commonwealth of Independent States...

...he strongly doubts Zyuganov and the Communist Party will have much respect for international law...

...Meanwhile, he has been distributing free copies of Your Right to Government Information to journalists, politicians, university law departments, and libraries...

...It was precisely this kind of ignorance that past regimes counted on, and Schmidt sees the same assumptions at work in Zyuganov's pledge to bring the press and television back under government control...

...Rural Soviets and agrarian societies, efficiently mobilized in the parliamentary races, broadcast the Communist platform into regions where other parties lack any meaningful organization...

...another voice in the ever louder chorus chanting the strains of class warfare...

...For in these circumstances it would not be hard to bring back police harassment and mandated monopolies on power under the guise of satisfying the public's demand for a restoration of order...

...Schmidt's own experience under Stalin prompted him to establish the St...

...What happens in practice is something else...

...In 1992 he founded Citizen's Watch to monitor law enforcement bodies and target areas where new procedures need to be introduced...

...Glasnost and the post-coup reforms made it possible to pursue a broader range of interests that the early rights activists had neither the resources nor the context to address—soldiers' rights, protection of the accused, prison reforms, etc...

...A Freedom of Information law, says Pustintsev, would be an important step toward delineating the parameters of government secrecy and pre-empting the traditional Communist practice of hiding behind walls of mystery and silence...

...The reform-minded Our Home is Russia Party, headed by Prime Minister Viktor S. Chernomyrdin, took 55 seats...

...He furthernotes their mutual disdain for Western-style reform and its nouveau riche beneficiaries, and how this colors their vision of a society purged of non-Slavic influence and class difference...

...Both are fortified by the vengeful political climate, says Pustintsev...

...Neither does the fact that a rise in lower profile cases like that of Rudolf Mazarsky has attracted scant attention abroad...

...Their antic hostility toward each other in the preceding Parliament aside, he also points out, they voted together to continue funding the war in Chechnya, recommended extending the term of mandatory military service and opposed outlawing fascist organizations...

...At Citizen's Watch, a draft bill outlawing the routine "initiation" violence visited upon conscripts by senior officers in the Russian military was completed weeks ahead of schedule and placed before the Duma...

...The treatment of Aleksandr Nikitin has been condemned by Amnesty International and the European Parliament, but the European Council has remained silent...

...The project, undertaken with an organization called Soldiers' Mothers, is believed to have been a factor in Yeltsin's May 16 campaign promise to end conscription by the year 2000 and introduce the concept of a volunteer Army in Russia...

...Schmidt does not share that optimism...

...International resolve to influence goings-on in Russia is equally questionable from Schmidt's perspective...

...This does not bode well...

...Significantly boosting the number of signatures required to nominate a presidential candidate from the present 1 million would—more subtly than Article Six of the Soviet Constitution—assure the permanence of a Communist return to the Kremlin...

...The then Conservative British Prime Minister, it will be recalled, came away from the meeting saying, "I like Mr...

...Amnesty International has designated Nikitin a prisoner of conscience, but he has been denied bail and is still sitting in jail awaiting trial...

...It hardly qualifies as thoughtful democratic reform, in his view, because it failed to create a level playing field—that is...

...he believes it may be an effective deterrent to gross infringements on civil liberties at home...

...More important, state prosecutors continue to have broad latitude and routinely obstruct the choice of defense counsel...

...Boris Pustintsev, who was in jail from 1957 to 1962 for signing an open letter to the government demanding the evacuation of Soviet troops from Hungary, shares Schmidt's concerns...

...His hope is that this will produce a ground-swell of public support for the bill, ensuring its passage despite the Duma's new makeup...

...So Schmidt is petitioning the Constitutional Court to compel the Supreme Court to rule in disputes like Mazarsky's...

...One such refusenik, Rudolf Mazarsky, has sought in vain to establish that material he was privy to long ago, while a submarine design engineer, is common knowledge today...

...The two rights workers see the Communists deploying the nationalists—who have harassed the democracy movement since 1991 —to silence troublemakers in the Duma and on the streets...

...He also knows that nationalists like Zhirinovsky and Aleksandr I. Lebed—the popular Afghan War hero who won an independent seat in the new Duma—are not exactly democrats themselves...

...Zyuganov's performance at the World Economic Forum held February 1-6 in Davos, Switzerland, is cited as a typical example...

...On February 10 the Lawyers' Committee agreed to Nikitin's request that it defend him, but Schmidt was not allowed to meet his client until April 4, and then only after securing a Constitutional Court ruling that cleared the way...

...The object is to make Russians aware of the rights they can demand under a democratic system of government...

...And the effort has included preparing a version of the Freedom of Information Act for introduction in Parliament next fall...

...Interestingly, the affair has received only limited print coverage in Russia and none on television...

...We can do business together...

...In fact, Schmidt finds it remarkable that the Communists and nationalists have yet to present a united front...

...The 1993 Constitution, Schmidt ob-servesas he explains the cause of the chaos, embraces Western standards: Among many other things, it guarantees the independence of the courts, the right to a jury trial, and the right to consult w ith a defense attorney of one's own choosing within 24 hours of being arrested...