Russia

The following Justice Initiative projects are underway in, or relevant to, Russia:

Equality and Citizenship

Russia: Combating Discrimination: Strategies for Lawyers and NGOs
The grave discrimination that minority groups suffer in Russia requires urgent remedies. There is almost no experience in the human rights community of litigating discrimination as such, and a tremendous need to build these capacities so that the legal system may become an effective antidiscrimination tool. Systematic documentation of the problem, necessary to prove discrimination, does not yet exist. The challenge will be to develop appropriate documentation and build Russian NGOs’ capacity to use this as a basis for litigation. To meet this challenge, the Justice Initiative is developing a number of projects with the purposes of reducing the incidence of ethnic and racial discrimination by state actors in the Russian Federation, and building NGO legal capacity, through documentation and litigation to challenge discriminatory acts in Russian courts, at the European Court of Human Rights, and/or at the CERD.

Anticorruption

Russia: The Use and Misuse of Administrative Resources
State and public resources are reportedly employed by incumbents in Russia to electoral advantage. The Justice Initiative and Transparency International-Russia together launched a project to monitor the misuse of these "administrative resources" during the election campaign for the 2003 Russian Federal State Duma (parliament).