European leaders should use the upcoming EU-Russia summit to convey alarm over deteriorating human rights in Russia and to press for concrete improvements. The summit is scheduled for November 18 and 19, 2009, in Stockholm.

Russian authorities should immediately drop criminal libel charges against Oleg Orlov, the prominent activist who heads Memorial Human Rights Center. The charges stem from Orlov’s statement that Ramzan Kadyrov, the president of Chechnya, was responsible for the murder of Natalia Estemirova, Memorial’s leading researcher in Chechnya.

In Copenhagen this month, Human Rights Watch presented its proposal for institutional reform to monitor host countries' compliance with international human rights norms. We also believe that the IOC should make host city contracts public.

The European Parliament has awarded its Sakharov Prize for Freedom of Thought to Memorial, a leading Russian human rights organization and to the prominent human rights activists Ludmilla Alekseeva, Sergei Kovalev, and Oleg Orlov, and other Russian human rights defenders.

(New York, October 9, 2009) – The award of the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize to US President Barack Obama should encourage him to apply his stated principles to both foreign and domestic human rights policy.

The international community should press Georgia and Russia to bring to justice those who violated the laws of war, causing many civilian deaths and injuries and widespread destruction of civilian property in last summer’s short but deadly conflict. As an EU-funded independent, international fact-finding mission on the conflict in Georgia published its report on September 30, 2009, the lack of accountability is striking.