Beginning of Meeting with Presidential Commissioner for Childrens Rights Pavel Astakhov.
February 2, 2010
The Kremlin, Moscow
Встреча с Уполномоченным при Президенте по правам ребёнка Павлом Астаховым.
2 февраля 2010 года Москва, Кремль
PRESIDENT OF RUSSIA DMITRY MEDVEDEV: Good afternoon. Mr Astakhov, you have worked as Presidential Commissioner for Childrens Rights for a month now. We have met and discussed various issues. Of course were not expecting you to summarise the results of your work but you have identified and assessed the problems that exist. Ive read a number of your presentations, and they struck me as both reasonable and accurate responses to the problems now confronting us. On what are you planning to focus? What do you see as the most important challenges in the current situation?
PRESIDENTIAL COMMISSIONER FOR CHILDRENS RIGHTS PAVEL ASTAKHOV: First of all, Mr President, I would like to thank you for the confidence that you have shown in me. This is the first opportunity I have had to do that personally, officially. During my first month in the new position, unfortunately the main priority has simply been trying to save the children. Of course I would like to focus on other areas as well. There are a lot of them, including teaching families their responsibilities, which I believe should be one of the nations main priorities. We often see children and teenagers who grow up with no understanding of what constitutes a responsible approach to creating a family, to raising children in a family, because unfortunately many of them have never known it themselves.
Currently we are concentrating on trying to comply with your instruction that was explicitly set out in your executive order concerning the creation of regional commissioners for childrens rights across the country. In some places the results have been positive: the first commissioners appeared in 1998, as the result of an experiment that UNICEF suggested. This was successful in various places, for example, in Kaluga and Volgograd Regions there are still such commissioners, but elsewhere they have been abolished, for example, in Yekaterinburg and St Petersburg, though St Petersburg has now created a commissioner in compliance with your order. I think we need to complete this network of commissioners as soon as possible, because they have proven to be very effective units on the ground.
DMITRY MEDVEDEV: I imagine so. The only thing I would like to warn you against is creating a bureaucratic system of commissioners, in the vertical form we know so well. But if they comprise efficient and independent people who are not unduly influenced by the local authorities and willing to work strictly within the law to protect the interests of the child and family in the broadest sense, that would be good.
PAVEL ASTAKHOV: That is exactly the sort of people that I want in these positions, because my previous profession has made the bureaucracy totally alien to me.
DMITRY MEDVEDEV: I hope so. This is one of our most serious problems and you need to take up arms against it.
PAVEL ASTAKHOV: Generally speaking I am not a narrow specialist in childrens rights, but the more I deal with people, with professionals, the more convinced I am that it is more important to show children sincere love and respect than it is to teach them their rights. So precisely what we need here is not so much cool, calculating people who understand what to do, but people who care passionately about this problem. There are such people.
DMITRY MEDVEDEV: You know as well as anyone, a knowledge of the law is still a very important thing. As lawyers we both understand this. Because after all in the regions and municipalities there has been a great deal of lawlessness. Nobody respects or bothers to look at authorised documents. At best, some papers get shifted from place to place.
So if the President sets the post of Commissioner for Childrens Rights and there are commissioners working in the field who will be addressing the same subject and drum into the heads of officials and other persons involved in raising and educating children some of the basic formulas of family law, this would be no bad thing. Of course that is not in itself enough. We need to respond to the situations youve described, but we also need to educate.
PAVEL ASTAKHOV: I absolutely agree. The latest developments in Izhevsk about which you probably heard ...
DMITRY MEDVEDEV: I did.
http://www.kremlin.ru
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