Human Rights Defender
Правозащитник
The Human Rights Defender, a quarterly journal put out by Human Rights Publishers, Moscow, since 1994, is one of the most widely respected sources of human rights coverage in the CIS. The HRD’s objective is to provide readers with high quality analytical materials on human rights theory and practice, including commentary on the most pressing issues in the field of human rights in Russia and abroad. The HRD is not a political body – it does not have any political or other special interests beyond serving as a carrier of ideas concerning human rights and civil society to the public. Russia does have thousands of NGOs, but it lacks some very basic civil society institutions as well as principles of civic awareness on the level of the individual citizen. Moreover, even the NGO community and activists suffer from past ills, relying on old approaches and revealing a mentality characteristic of the Soviet days. The HRD’s mission is enlightenment – providing citizens with the information base necessary for them to become real actors in a democratic society. HRD addresses the entire society, including those of its members who are already familiar with the ideas of human rights and civil society but who may not know what to do with them, as well as those who may not even have any concept of these issues.
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