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The fourth annual conference of the Finnish-Russian Civic Forum “FINROSFORUM 2010” (http://finrosforum.fi/) was held on July 21-22, 2010 at the cultural center “Sofia” in Helsinki. This platform united a group of experts from Russia, Finland and other countries in the fields of politics, economics and human rights. More than 100 representatives of the civil society of the two countries and guests from other European countries took part in the discussion. The event coincided with the visit of the President of the Russian Federation in Finland.
Forum participants authored an appeal to the presidents of the two countries – Dmitry Medvedev and Tarja Halonen, where they expressed their hope that in the field of modernization there will be included the construction of independent judiciary, the guarantee of law primacy as well as the development of strong democratic institutes in Russian-Finnish co-operation. Otherwise, “any technologic modernization efforts will fail”, as it was stated in the open letter of the forum's participants. The authors of this letter are concerned about the initiative to empower the FSB to issue official warnings to physical persons; to the discrimination of human rights defenders, political movements' members, trade unionists and journalists; to an “unjust judicial system and a lack of procedural guarantees”; what is more they are concerned by the fact that “Russian society is still deprived of freedom of assembly”. For the full version of the document, please visit the FinRosForum website: http://finrosforum.fi/finrosforum-2010-6.
Among the Russian participants of the Forum were human rights defenders like Yuri Dzhibladze, Tatyana Kasatkina, Lev Ponomarev, as well as the YHRM members – Viktoria Gromova and Konstantin Baranov. Among the speakers were the well-known Russian politicians – Boris Nemtsov, Ilya Ponomarev, Oleg Kozlovsky, Marina Litvinovich, as well as the political analyst Andrei Piontkovsky, and others.
This year's main subject of the meeting was the modernization of the Russian society, proposed by the Russian President Dmitry Medvedev. This subject was assumed to be a basis for the new program of co-operation between Russia and the EU - “Partnership for modernization”.
The second day of the conference was entirely dedicated to the project discussion aiming at creating new forms of co-operation between the EU and Russian non-governmental organizations. The focus lay on the question of the creation of a so-called EU-Russia Civic Forum.
“The YHRM, as one of the initiators of the idea of a EU-Russia Civic Forum, was very interested in the discussion of this project. At present, in different associations there are lots of discussions on aims, structures and formats of this new platform for the interaction between EU and Russian civil societies. Naturally, the participants of this process have different approaches to these problems. Russian Human Rights Non-Governmental Organizations formulated their point of view in the special document – “Russian NGO Position on the establishment of the EU – Russia Civic Forum”, the document was presented to the Forum's participants in Helsinki by Yuri Dzhibladze, the President of the Democracy and Human Rights Development Center and the YHRM honorary member. The other points of view were read out by Fraser Cameron, the EU – Russia Center director in Brussel, and Heidi Hautala, the Chairman of the European Parliament Subcommittee on Human Rights and head of Finnish-Russian Civic Forum. As a result, the discussion's participants generally supported the idea of the establishment of a Civic Forum and agreed to continue the discussion of these issues remotely. The next landmark in the project development should be the meeting of Non-Governmental Organizations – the Forum's initiators from different countries, scheduled on September 2010”, - commented Konstantin Baranov, the YHRM working group coordinator on interaction with EU institutions.
The Finnish-Russian Civic Forum was founded in January 2007 by a group of people who engage in democracy development and the Human Rights situation in Russia.

More information in Russian: http://kavkaz-uzel.ru/articles/171888/