Healers in Wonderland

My professional duties brought me the other day to the reception in honor of the winners of the Hugo Grotius Prize (named for Dutch humanist and jurist Huig de Groot) awarded by Moscow journal Mezhdunarodnoye pravo (International Law) and the Embassy of the Netherlands in Moscow to the best Russian international- law experts. This time the winners’ list included former Premier Yevgeny Primakov and a lady professor from Rostov, who, as the organizers explained, works in the North Caucasus, a most difficult region from the standpoint of applying international law. After the awards ceremony, journalists began to ask Mr. Primakov to what extent the Chechnya war complies with the norms of international law. The academician tersely replied it did and suggested they turn to the Rostov guest. Excited by attention from the press, the lady laureate began to explain assertively (you could feel this was not the first time she did it) how correct and justifiable Russia’s actions are.

“And the refugees?”

“Their plight also seems to have improved recently.”

I hear all this every day from Russian officials on television and the radio. But here I was among, pardon the expression, lawyers, among them savants of international law whose objective should be to defend precisely this law rather than the official attitude toward it. And what kind of professionalism lesson will students learn from this much-respected winner, what kind of respect for the law can we expect from them?

The next day I came to know the impressions Lord Judd, PACE delegation leader, had gained during his trip to Chechnya. The Russians wanted to do their best. They brought the European Parliament members to Grozny, and Lord Judd was shocked to see the destruction of a whole city by that country’s authorities at the turn of the twenty-first century. They showed the Chernokozovo detention camp (see the nice conditions!), and the lord was stunned to learn that the inmates had not yet met their lawyers. But even more than Lord Judd was shocked the Russian Acting President’s special human rights envoy Vladimir Kalamanov: what shocked him was the European guests’ reaction. Why so nervous? “These are arguments of a person from a calm country. We have a little different system of values at the current stage of Russia’s development.”

Here we are. It looks like Wonderland: the sound-minded people are treated as heavily ill by those unaware of their own illness. Meanwhile, it is the Chechnya campaign, the attitude toward refugees, destruction of Grozny, and the situation with Radio Liberty correspondent Andrey Babitsky, that have demonstrated the extent to which Russian society is sick — from the man soon to be elected president to the last man in the street ready to cast his vote for Vladimir Putin.

All we can do is only to hope that the disease is not hopeless.