This month Mary Page talks with Oleg Kozlovsky, a senior strategic adviser at Amnesty International and a human rights activist of long standing. Previously Oleg Kozlovsky has been a former executive director of Vision of Tomorrow Foundation and an analyst with the Anti-Corruption Policy Lab at the Higher School of Economics in Moscow, and also worked at Transparency International in Russia. He has been an activist with Navalny’s team and was co-founder of the Solidarity United Democratic Movement and of Oborona, a democratic youth movement in Russia. Earlier in his career, Oleg Kozlovsky was a member of the Executive Committee of the Other Russia Coalition from 2007-2009 and a co-chair of the youth branch of the Union of Right Forces (SPS) political party between 2006 and 2007. He has been an organizer of many peaceful protests and rallies in defence of democracy and human rights in Russia, Belarus, Ukraine, and Moldova. He has been arrested and detained multiple times for his role in these protests, and was conscripted illegally into the army and released only after an international campaign of support. Oleg Kozlovsky has also been a visiting scholar at George Washington University. He has studied maths at Moscow State University and democracy and development at Stanford University. Originally from Moscow, he currently lives in Wiesbaden, Germany.
This interview was recorded on 30 September 2024.
Mary's questions:
1 For some years now Amnesty International has no longer had an office in Russia. How much more difficult has that made it to understand what is going on in terms of human rights developments in the country?
2 Your personal history as an activist goes back many years before you joined Amnesty. Could you tell us something about how you became an activist in the first place? What organisations did you work for - and are they still in existence?
3 It is generally recognised that the human rights situation has grown drastically worse since February 2022 when Russia launched its war against Ukraine, but human rights were deteriorating for many years before that. In your view have there been particular turning points in this process? Or has it been a year-by-year month-by-month gradual decline?
4 Are there examples of human rights groups in Russia that are still able to work?
5 Is there support for human rights among the Russian public in general? Is there a difference between the generations - are younger people in Russia more supportive of human rights?
6 Is it possible to say which human rights are most subject to repression - or most under threat - in Russia today?
7 Another development associated with the war has been Russia's expulsion from the Council of Europe and hence from the jurisdiction of the European Court of Human Rights? How great a loss is this for the cause of human rights in Russia?
8 Many observers argue that the future of Russia depends very much on the outcome of the war. The implication is that there is more chance of positive change occurring in Russia if Russia loses the war than if Russia wins. How do you view the situation?
9 You yourself have had to leave Russia because of the clampdown on human rights organisations. How difficult is it to live abroad? And how do you see the prospects for returning?
