Journalist Anna Politkovskaya has been posthumously awarded a medal from Russian Human Rights Commissioner Vladimir Lukin on Saturday, in the run-up to the International Human Rights Day.
Politkovskaya, a Novaya Gazeta commentator, was shot and killed in the lobby of her apartment building in October.
At a request by Politkovskayas relatives and the Novaya Gazeta editorial staff, the newspapers editor-in-chief, Dmitry Muratov, received the medal for Politkovskaya. He said in a brief speech that over 40 criminal cases were opened following Politkovskayas articles.
"More efficient measures should be taken so that journalists dissenting with the governments position can work freely," Lukin said at the ceremony.
Among those awarded were also Boris Trefilov, the director of the Kemerovo regional library for the visually impaired, who is blind himself, and four flight attendants (one of them posthumously) from an Airbus A310 of Siberian Airlines, which crashed after landing at the Irkutsk airport in July. There were 203 people on board the plane, and 124 of them died. The flight attendants helped rescue the rest of the passengers at the risk of their own lives.
Another recipient was Margarita Slezova, an instructor at an orphanage in Kondopoga in the republic of Karelia, whose son was killed in an ethnically motivated riot in August. Slezova, however, publicly called for a truce at a rally following the tragic events.
A number of prominent political and public figures took part in the ceremony, among them Council of Europe Commissioner for Human Rights Thomas Hammarberg, U.S. Ambassador to Russia William Burns, Yabloko party leader Grigory Yavlinsky, Moscow Helsinki Group Chair Lyudmila Alexeyeva, State Duma deputy Oleg Smolin, and others.
Yavlinsky said at the ceremony that it was difficult to defend human rights in Russia, because "there is a lack of independent courts, an independent parliament, and independent and politically influential media outlets."
"It is extremely difficult to defend human rights. As one human rights activist put it, it is just like swimming in hydrochloric acid against the tide," Yavlinsky said. International Human Rights day has been observed on December 10 since 1948, when the UN General Assembly adopted and proclaimed the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
http://www.cdi.org/russia/johnson/2006-278-24.cfm
