On the verge of the summit  summit of presidents of Russia and the US Vladimir Putin and Josef Biden in Geneva, The Washington Post published the article of Vladimir Kara-Murza where he reminds that there are hundreds of political prisoners in Russia and President Biden can help free some of them.

As President Biden prepares for summit, he is emphasizing the issue of human rights and promises to underscore the commitment of the United States, Europe and like-minded democracies to stand up for human rights and dignity.

One of the main principles of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, to which both the U.S. and Russia belong as founding members, holds that issues relating to human rights, fundamental freedoms, democracy and the rule of law do not belong exclusively to the internal affairs of the State.

It’s difficult to know where to start the conversation with Putin on human rights – elections have been reduced to prearranged rituals without real competition, freedom of the media has been stifled, peaceful demonstrators are routinely beaten and arrested, laws that have criminalized political opposition as “extremist” or “undesirable are enforced,  state-sponsored assassins operate with impunity, be it with poison (as in the case of anticorruption campaigner Alexei Navalny or the author of this article) or with bullets (as with the murder of Putin’s leading opponent Boris Nemtsov).

All these issues should, and hopefully will, be raised by Biden in Geneva.

In November 1985, President Ronald Reagan in Geneva made clear to Gorbachev before the summit that progress on other issues would depend on addressing human rights violations in the Soviet Union, chief among these was the issue of political prisoners. Reagan personally intervened on behalf of Andrei Sakharov, Yuri Orlov and Anatoly (Natan) Sharansky, all three were freed within just over a year.

Today Russia has nearly 400 political and religious prisoners — a conservative estimate by human rights groups in line with the international definition of the term. They include Navalny, Andrei Pivovarov, Alexei Pichugin, Russia’s longest-serving political prisoner and the last hostage of the “Yukos Affair”, and Yuri Dmitriev, a historian persecuted for documenting Soviet-era mass executions.

“Biden is unlikely to return from Geneva with any substantive agreements. But, just as his predecessors, he can make real change for those unjustly imprisoned by the Kremlin with his personal advocacy” – Kara-Murza writes.

Source: The Washington Post