Hillary Clinton relays CPJ's mission in Russia

Sometimes you wonder about the impact of a report or an advocacy mission. Of course the major point is often to show human rights defenders and independent journalists in an authoritarian country that you care for their safety and appreciate their work and courage.
But the feeling that noone in power will really listen is always there. The Russia mission of the CPJ (Committee to Protect Journalists)- a delegation composed of Kati Marton, Nina Ognianova and me - broke the rules. First we had some serious interaction with Russian officials and especially with investigators of crimes against journalists. Second in Brussels we were asked by the various European Union institutions (Council,Commission and Parliament) to share our findings with their experts. The report "The anatomy of injustice" was distributed by EP staff at a special hearing of the human rights subcommittee on Russia.
And third, secretary of state Hillary Clinton actually quoted the CPJ report during her visit to Moscow. Here are her remarks.

"Speaking at a town hall meeting with rights activists and opposition journalists during a visit to Russia this month, U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton publicly cited CPJ during a town hall meeting and expressed concern at Russia’s poor record of impunity in the cases of murdered journalists. “A society cannot be truly open when those who stand up and speak out are murdered. And people cannot trust in the rule of law when killers act with impunity,” said Clinton. “According to the Committee to Protect Journalists, 18 journalists have been killed in Russia since 2000 in retaliation for their work. But in only one case have the killers been convicted. When violence like this goes unpunished in any society, it’s undermining the rule of law, chills public discourse, which is, after all, the lifeblood of an open society, and it diminishes the public’s confidence and trust in their own government.”

Human rights advocacy is like Sisyphus's work,it requires a sense of time and history, it is often exhaustingly slow, but its success is based on an accumulation of sometimes modest sometimes larger achievements.
It requires in particular a convergence between civil society actors and diplomats in order to transform denunciations and facts into a strategy in the realm of power.