Lyytikäinen and van der Vet’s “Violence and Human Rights in Russia: How Human Rights Defenders Develop their Tactics in the Face of Danger, 2005-2013,” examines how Russian human rights defenders (HRDs) creatively manage the government’s restrictions on their activities. The authors analyze coping practices of two groups of HRDs: opposition youth activists in Moscow and human rights lawyers in the Northern Caucasus. Despite restrictive legislation, Russian HRDs engage in high-risk activism and use the available opportunities to develop creative tactics to manage fear, assess risk, and voice grievances on behalf of marginalized communities.
Since 2005, the Russian government has enacted legislation curtailing funding to HRDs and restricting the activity of NGOs engaged in political activities. These laws have led to the harassment, intimidation, and imprisonment of political activists. Comparing how protesters and litigators working under a restrictive government employed strategic methods to challenge legislation, Vet and Lyytikäinen assess how these two groups responded to the challenges of engaging in high-risk activism. Specifically, the authors examined “how to organize advocacy and protest in risky situations, how to manage risk and fear, and how to use domestic and international legal mechanisms in a repressive state.”
In their assessment of how HRDs negotiate repressive legislation, the authors recognize that not only must HRDs negotiate the cost and risk of participation in activism, but they must also carefully and strategically plan and manage any dilemmas concerning “which rights to protect over others, which victims to represent, and whether to cooperate with or confront state authorities.” They note that HRDs creatively choose to respond to the constraints of their work by actively managing their fears and building legal literacy and mental resilience to counter the high costs of activism. The authors highlight classes organized by activist leaders that instruct other activists on their legal rights and approaches to communicating with the police as an example of these techniques. Additionally, when a member of their organization is arrested, some organizations will assemble outside of the police station until the member is released to demonstrate solidarity to the arrested member. In so doing, activists “use their own vulnerability towards state violence as a technique to draw public attention to their causes or try to find alternative ways of developing their organization’s strategies.” Vet and Lyytikäinen suggest that these methods challenge how we perceive HRD work as heroic and coherent. What their research shows, however, is that HRD work is developed “behind-the-scenes…to overcome dilemmas and fear in their daily work through craftiness and creativity.”
Vet and Lyytikäinen recognize the difficulties HRDs face in fighting ambiguous laws that can be interpreted to fit legislatures’ agendas and target HRDs. Because the Russian government rapidly changes NGO legislation, HRDs must continuously evaluate and develop tactics to maintain their activities and avoid criminal prosecution. Thus, HRDs must reinvent their tactics to challenge the state within the boundaries of domestic legal mechanisms and the political environment. An example of HRDs changing tactics occurred in Chechnya in 2009 when, after human rights activist Natalia Estemirova was abducted and killed, it was determined the area was too dangerous for continued HRD monitoring of human rights abuses. Several HRDs adapted to the dangerous working conditions by forming the Joint Mobile Group (JMG). The JMG is composed of attorneys who rotate to Chechnya for only a few months at a time so that they can pursue civil investigations and court actions while trying to minimize their presence in order to mitigate the risk of being attacked.
As demonstrated by groups like JMG, HRDs in Russia live and work in a precarious state under a democratic-authoritarian political regime that systemically cuts funding and targets human rights work, which requires HRDs to continuously negotiate how they choose to interact with the police, courts, and government officials. Lyytikäinen and van der Vet successfully highlight how HRDs face extensive risk in their work, and, as such, have no choice but to routinize the experiences of fear and danger through legal education, confronting new laws, and testing the boundaries of police violence as a means to respond to repressive NGO legislation.
NOTE: This summary is produced by the Rule of Law Collaborative, not by the original author(s).