Badge of Courage

Recently, Russian journalist Anna Politkovskaya was gunned down close to her home in Moscow by an unknown assasin. She had been highly critical of the Kremlin's action in Chechnya and her own newspaper Novaya Gazeta suggests she was killed for her reporting.

Stanislav Dmitrievskii is executive director of the Russian Chechen Friendship Society - an NGO that monitors human rights violations in Chechnya and the Northern Caucasus. It runs the Russian Chechen Information Agency and co-publishes a “rights protection” newspaper. Stanisalv has been given a two year suspended sentence for publishing articles written by the late Chechen separatist leader Aslan Maskhadov and his envoy Akhmed Zakayev. Both articles contained calls for a peaceful resolution of the Chechen conflict. Here, Stanislav talks about these allegations and why, despite personal risk, he continues to speak out about Chechnya.

Oksana Chelysheva works with Stanislav as the RCFS editor and has received threatening leaflets distributed against her, labelling her as a traitor and supporter of terrorist activities carried out by Chechen fighters. Here she talks about this, and how journalism and human rights are under threat in Russia. Both Stanislav and Oksana received the 2006 Amnesty International Award for Human Rights Journalism Under Threat (pictured above by Amnesty) Feature length 14 mins.

For the Russian Chechen Friendship Society go to www.ria.hrnnov.ru

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