The side event examined prevalent legal strategies and frameworks utilized by authoritarian regimes in Central Eastern Europe and Central Asia (CEECA) to impede civil society’s role in public health improvement, protection of human rights, and the delivery of life-saving harm reduction services.

The Andrey Rylkov Foundation urges countries to stop the war on drugs and provide full rehabilitation to the victims! On 26 June, the Andrey Rylkov Foundation joins the global advocacy campaign, Support Don’t Punish Day, to shed light on the devastating consequences of the War on Drugs in Russia and its expansion into Ukraine. Collaborating with Drugreporter, the Foundation releases a short video exposing the atrocities inflicted by punitive drug policies, aiming to raise global awareness and demand urgent change. 

How will the current war affect harm reduction in Russia? We asked two experts, Michail Golichenko and Alexei Lahov, to share with us their prognosis. 

The Charitable Fund Humanitarian Action in Saint Petersburg is fighting back against the crackdown on harm reduction organisations: a court recently annulled the government decision to include them in the infamous foreign agent list. We interviewed Alexei Lahov, Director of Development of the NGO.    

The animated documentary is based on the true story of Kostya Proletarsky, a drug user and HIV activist who died as a result of mistreatment and torture at a Russian prison. The animation features original audio interviews with Kostya and his mother Irina, and aims to commemorate Kostya and many others who have not survived prisons around the world. 

Vitaly Milonov, a Russian government politician notorious for anti-gay and antisemitic remarks, has found a new enemy: The Andrey Rylkov Foundation, a harm reduction organisation in Moscow.

Ivan Anoshkin’s life is a chronicle of the state’s crimes against human beings and his path to strength, truth, and freedom.  

On February 10 the deputies of the Russian parliament adopted, in the third and final reading, a bill to increase the sentence for “inciting use of drugs” on the Internet to 15 years.

The Rights Reporter Foundation (Drugreporter) and the International Network of People who use Drugs (INPUD) produced this documentary film series that aims to document how the movement of people who use drugs have formed around the world, how they maintain momentum and mobilise, and how they undertake their work and show resilience in a context of criminalisation, marginalisation and oppression. This is the main summary page of all the 10 episodes.

In today’s episode of the oral history of the movement of people who use drugs, we travel to three Eastern European countries, where activists fight very restrictive drug policies.