Mary Page talks with Dmitri Makarov, a leading human rights activist and Council member of the Moscow Helsinki Group, where Dmitri has also worked as programme coordinator. He has also worked previously as a co-chair of the Coordinating Council of the international Youth Human Rights Movement, based in Voronezh. In the past he was also one of the initiators of Legal Team, a group providing legal support for grass root activist groups. He has regularly run training courses on human rights, advocacy and campaigning in Russia and the countries of the former Soviet Union. The Moscow Helsinki Group is Russia’s oldest human rights organisation, originally founded by Soviet dissidents in 1976 to monitor fulfilment by the Soviet government of the 1975 Helsinki Accords.
