Andreas Umland

In 1996, the Russian Federation became a member of the Council of Europe. Two years later, the Russian parliament ratified the Council’s major document—the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR). These papers were presented at a conference at Yekaterinburg in spring 2001. The collection represents a snapshot of Russian and Western approaches to human rights protection at a moment when Russia was going through an adaptation of the political system created by Boris Yeltsin to the new modes of state-society relations being introduced by Vladimir Putin. Contents: Sergey Alexeyev on human rights and Modernity; Rainer Arnold on the EU Charter of Fundamental Rights; Valery Mikhailenko on ethnic separatism; Julia Kharlamova on the impossibility of an ECHR-implementation in Russia; Yekaterina Khodzhayeva on human rights discourses in Tatarstan’s mass media; Anatoly Azarov on the Russians’ knowledge about the ECHR; Manja Hussner on the incorporation of international treaties into Russian law; Marat Salikov on the Constitutional Court; Anton Burkov on the detention of mentally ill persons; Igor Shirmanov on ambiguities in Russian legal norms; Olga Selikhova on human rights issues in the regions; Olga Aleksenko on the Human Rights Commission of Rostov; Yelena Goncharova on the right to a fair trial; Tatyana Gladkova on the Sverdlovsk Oblast Ombudsman; Andrey Lyamzin on Yekaterinburg’s detention system; Andreas Umland with Oxana Stouppo on Western policies towards Russia.

The Editor:
Andreas Umland, CertTransl (Leipzig), MA (Stanford), MPhil (Oxford), DipPolSci, DrPhil (FU Berlin) was a visiting fellow at Stanford’s Hoover Institution in 1997-99, and Harvard’s Weatherhead Center in 2001-02. He taught at Yekaterinburg’s Urals State University and Urals Law Academy in 1999-2001, and Kyiv’s Shevchenko University in 2002-03. Since January 2004, he has been a temporary lecturer in Russian and East European Studies at St. Antony’s College Oxford.