Tonight I had dinner with two extraordinary figures in human rights law, at a quaint french restaurant in midtown New York. Karinna Moskalenko, a world renowned human rights lawyer, who has defended the likes of Mikhail Khodorkovsky.
For more than a decade, she has been arguing cases before the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg, France, to whose judgments Russia has been legally bound ever since it incorporated the European Convention on Human Rights in its 1993 Constitution.You can read her profile in the Journal.
She was in New York, giving a speech the next morning at the Council of Foreign Relations on the topic of international arbitration, moderated by Andrei Illarionov (Putin's former economic adviser, who now works for the Cato Institute in DC).
The other gentleman, Professor Roger Clark , is a scholar of international law and has traveled the world extensively teaching courses on human rights law. Originally from New Zeland, he has spent the last 30 years at Rutgers teaching and running. I found his story about his time teaching a course for a group of Chinese Justices on human rights law the most fascinating. The justices, diligently attended every class and did quite well on the exams, perhaps even better than some of the american students, but the question remains what they took away from the lectures.
Karinna, aside from her worldwide superstar status, is a very down to earth and very entertaining person. She had lots of stories from France and spoke with the waiters in French. There is lots happening in Strasbourg these days, at the European Court of Human Rights, and whenever Russia looses a human rights case, it always pays. So now with huge pending law suit against the Russian government, with potential payouts in the billions, much more attention is given to these cases.
