This week our guest on the podcast is Yulia Fedotova, a
lawyer with a PhD in law from the city of Ekaterinburg.The issues discussed in the podcast include: the legal
profession; legal specialization; the Russian judicial system; successful legal cases; major human rights problems in Russia today; the role of the European Court of Human Rights; the recent constitutionalamendments; Russia and the Council of Europe; and the future of human rights inRussia.The music, from Stravinsky’s Elegy for Solo Viola, is performed for us by Karolina Herrera.
Sergei Nikitin writes on Facebook: "Since childhood I was attractedto the criminal law, and I actually wanted to become a police investigator. But Icouldn't accept a compromise with my conscience, work from 9 am for as long as they wanted andobey orders. So after an internship I changed my plans: I became a lawyer. Ahuman rights lawyer." - these are the words of our interviewee this week, Yulia Fedotova, a lawyer with a PhD in law from the city of Ekaterinburg. In addition to her work in the capital of the Urals federal district, Yuliamanages to work in Krasnodar region. In our conversation she interestinglycompares the state of justice in these two regions, figuratively describing thelaw enforcement system of the sunny southern region as "like a big ball of snakeskissing." Her words are confirmed by two incidents when courts inKrasnodar tried to frame Yulia herself as a member of an organization theRussian authorities have been coquettishly calling "undesirable.' Yulia has filed fifty-three applications to the European Court of Human Rights (of which the court deemed17 inadmissible, but accepted the rest) and has won many cases in the domestic courts. Fedotova is sharp-tongued,saying that a lawyer in today's Russia could be compared to someone diving tothe depths of the Marianna Trench with a broken aqua-lung in bloody faeces.Simon Cosgrove and I listened with great interest to Yulia, and you canhear her stories, including how a nine-day sentence for Evgeny Roizman turned into oneday thanks to the efforts of our interviewee."
SimonCosgrove adds: "If you want to listen to this podcast on the podcasts.com website andit doesn’t seem to play, please download by clicking on the three dots to theright. A summary of some of the week’s events in Russia relevant to humanrights can be found on our website https://rightsinrussia.org/week-ending-18-june-2021."