Television discredits human rights defenders

Moscow Helsinki Group Chair Liudmila Alekseyeva called statements that UK intelligence officers linked to funding NGOs in Russia a slanderous campaign against human rights defenders.

On Sunday, 22 January, the Spetsialnyi Korrespondent ("Special Correspondent") programme by Arkadii Mamontov on Rossiya television channel told about an operation of Russia's Federal Security Service which had exposed a group of British spies, Marc Doe, a UK diplomat, among them, allegedly working under the cover of the embassy and contacting Russian human rights defenders.

"This feature, to put it politely, is produced for illiterate and very trustful people," Liudmila Alekseyeva said. "Does Mamontov himself really think that spies still hide some microphones in some stones somewhere in the boulevard in this satellite, electronic age? Or what did they hide there, I really don't know. This is some kind of nonsense lacking respect for spectators."

The feature author, according to her, "has drawn the Moscow Helsinki Group into this spy story and he has done that quite slyly, as the material does not say directly that the MHG provided spy services to Doe."

"The author did not say that directly because he understands that I would sue him for that and I would succeed in this suit even in Russia where the court is not usually called independent. For that public which watches all this nonsense, the very fact that the Moscow Helsinki Group brand is mentioned in this programme is an insolent thing," Ms Alekseyeva said.

"This is a loathsome slanderous campaign against human rights defenders, designed to be sweeping, not by Mamontov though. Mamontov is just doing what he is told to. And this is done on all state-run channels: there have been two features about Blagoveshchensk with slander against human rights defenders and now this one," says Liudmila Alekseyeva. "This will continue, because as far as I understand the goal of such programmes is this: prepare the public opinion for a defeat of the human rights community, the most active and the most independent part of the third sector and civil society in Russia. The idea is to stifle human rights activists and then tread down the civil society, so that everyone is silent by 2007-08 and on. And introduce astonished mankind to the Public Chamber as a dummy civil society instead of the trodden real one. This is how I see this general plan conceived by somebody very important."

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