MOSCOW, September 17 (Itar-Tass) — “The public consultations” in the Internet over the candidates in the Presidential Council of Civil Society and Human Rights are over. The voting was consultative. The Presidential Human Rights Council will consider again all 190 questionnaires, and only the leaders in the voting can get in the list, head of the council Mikhail Fedotov stated. President Vladimir Putin will make the final choice.
The Novye Izvestia daily recalled that the voting in the Internet on the candidates in the Presidential Human Rights Council was held for two weeks. Some 86 people in 13 nominations were running for seats in the council. The final results on the number of opinions were made public at the official website of the council on Saturday. The winners in their nominations became famous journalists Leonid Parfenov and Maxim Shevchenko and politician Irina Khakamada. The final results showed that figures somehow related with some state-run structures rather than distinguished human rights activists turned out to be in the leaders in many categories.
The Kommersant daily reported executive director of the Golos association Lilia Shibanova named the results of the voting demonstrative, “It was interesting to see how this rating was formed. In the voting all candidates from the state authorities have won obviously. This means that unfortunately we cannot deal with those massive administrative opportunities, which turned out to be in the Internet.” Meanwhile, head of the Sova centre Alexander Verkhovsky told the newspaper, “As a matter of fact, this is not the elections. I do not know what those who invented it were seeking to measure and how they are seeking to interpret these results. All the same the president will elect members in the council. Let those be elected, who the president wants to elect.”
The Moskovsky Komsomolets daily noted that while the voting was held one seat became vacant in the council, as Lyudmila Alexeyeva quitted the Presidential Human Rights Council. Some 100 human rights activists are running for a vacant seat, as the latter handed in the questionnaires with the request to put them up for the Internet voting, but they were not permitted to participate in the voting for various reasons. The most active of them are negotiating with the council and are preparing lawsuits against the council’s chairman Mikhail Fedotov, because the latter did not permit them to run in the elections.