6 persons were awarded medal ‘Defender of Free Elections’

On December 3-4, the ‘Defender of Free Elections’ Award Committee has announced the medal winners at the II Citizen Forum held in St. Petersburg.

It was the 9th ‘Defender of Free Elections’ Award ceremony, held since 2009. The medal is awarded to the citizens of Russia who have demonstrated during the election campaign exceptional conscientiousness, were high-minded, persistently advocating for citizen electoral rights.

The Award Committee is composed of experts such as Arkady Lyubarev, Andrei Buzin, Gregory Melkonyants, Roman Udot, as well as journalists Ilya Krieger, Anastasia Kornia, Rosa Tsvetkova and Gregory Belonuchkin.

Six persons were awarded the medals.

Azat Sadgatovich Gabdulvaleev - for a project on analysis of video content from surveillance cameras installed at polling stations in Tatarstan during the 2012 Elections.

Andrei Nikolayeavich Zaitsev - for clampdown of UR campaign activities in Mordovia State University; thus, he was illegitimately arrested.

Alexey Aleksandrovich Moldavskiy - for adherence to the law and transparent vote count in the 18 September Elections. As an election commission member in voting capacity, he achieved compliance with the vote count provisions and addressed the final protocol irregularities to the Central Election Commission and respectively to the courts.

Stanislav Alekseyevich Pozdnyakov – for contribution to the detention of ballot stuffing suspect in the 26 April 2015 Elections in Balashikha and the preservation of evidence of ballot stuffing at the polling station No. 576.

Stanislav Zbignevich Raczynski - for the development and implementation of the project Election Information website ‘Nabla’ (nablawiki.ru).

Olga Vladislavovna Sheremetyeva - for the long-term efforts to challenge the elections results in the trial in St. Petersburg in 2014 and 2015, struggle against the arbitrariness of election commissions and judges. As a member of PEC No. 1568 of Nevsky district of St. Petersburg, she reported the falsification of turnout results and the final protocol in the Gubernatorial Elections, as well as rigged election results in the final protocol in the 4 September 2014 Municipal Elections.

To date, 36 persons have been awarded the medal.

Watch the Award Ceremony starting from 06:13:00 min of the video (in Russian).