Cotler: Media Must Shine Light on Political Prisoner Cases Like Alexey Pichugin’s Because “If Media Doesn’t Report, It is As if it Never Happened”
September 9, 2018
The Raoul Wallenberg Centre for Human Rights (RWCHR), a Montreal, Canada-based human rights organization, has launched an initiative to lend a voice to the cause of political prisoners and draw the media’s attention to the fates of the likes of Alexey Pichugin, Russia’s longest-serving political prisoner, and other wrongfully imprisoned individuals suffering a similar fate.
During an August 30 press conference on Parliament Hill in Ottawa, Canada’s former justice minister Irwin Cotler, who heads up RWCHR, told the media:
“So we are here today to effectively sound the alarm with regard to the pain and plight of these political prisoners, to shatter the silence that has been surrounding their imprisonment.”
Cotler, who has been an outspoken critic of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s treatment of Alexey Pichugin, and most recently called on human rights organization Amnesty International to recognize Alexey Pichugin as a “Prisoner of Conscience” via an ad in the U.K. daily The Guardian, explained that the project’s objective was to “plead cases and causes on behalf of political prisoners whose cases the centre has adopted, and who have a Canadian connection either because they have family in Canada, because their cases have been taken up by the Canadian Parliament, or because they have been represented by Cotler as their legal counsel.”
The role of the media, he said was critical, because “if the media doesn’t report on these cases, it is as if it is not there then, it is as if it never happened.”
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