For Russia’s rights community, recent weeks have been tough. In mid-February, Andrey Yurov, one of the founders of the Youth Human Rights Movement, was accused of having sexual relations with colleagues and participants in the movement, and that this behaviour amounted to sexual harassment and abuse. Yurov confirmed that he had had romantic and sexual relationships with women involved in the Youth Human Rights Movement, but denied that this was abuse.
All this emerged as news broke that the organisation was to close, provoking discussions of abuses of power in the organisation’s “own ranks”. The Youth Human Rights Movement (YHRM) was founded in 1999, and organised hundreds of activists from Russia, eastern Europe and the post-Soviet space, supporting youth involvement in rights defence and civic actiity.
Then, a few days later, the Meduza online media published an article on the “Network Case”, a high-profile terrorism investigation into Russian anarchists and anti-fascists. On 10 February, one group of defendants in this case, from the town of Penza, were found guilty, and sentenced to between six and 18 years in prison. Meduza’s article alleged that several of these defendants had been involved in dealing drugs and, most shockingly, the apparent murder of a man and woman. Reactions to this article have ranged from anger and confusion at the apparent haste and quality of Meduza’s work, to outrage that these allegations were not shared earlier.
