Yuri Markowitsch Schmidt

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Juri Markowitsch Schmidt ( Russian Юрий Маркович Шмидт ; born May 10, 1937 in Leningrad, today Saint Petersburg ; † January 12, 2013 ibid) was a Russian lawyer and human rights activist who was best known as the defender of Mikhail Khodorkovsky .

Life

Yuri Schmidt was born in Leningrad in 1937. Schmidt only met his father, who had survived in the Gulag for 26 years, in the mid-1950s.

In 1960 he graduated from Leningrad State University with a law degree and then worked as a criminal defense lawyer. Schmidt helped dissidents as early as the Soviet Union , even if he was not admitted as an official defender in political trials.

In 1991 Schmidt founded the “Russian Lawyers Committee for the Defense of Human Rights”, the first human rights organization of its kind in Russia. Since the beginning of the 1990s, he has defended prominent defendants such as the government critic Khodorkovsky or the environmental journalist Alexander Nikitin , for whom Schmidt was acquitted. After the killings of Galina Starowoitowa (1998) and Sergei Yuschenkow (2003), Schmidt represented the families of those killed. In 2004, he represented the director of the Sakharov Center , Yuri Samodurow , who was responsible for the controversial exhibition “ Attention! Religion ”was charged with sedition.

Schmidt has received numerous awards for his commitment to human rights, including the Petra Kelly Prize (2006), the Dr. Rainer Hildebrandt Medal (2010) and the Federal Cross of Merit (2012).

Schmidt, who was a sharp critic of the Putin government, died in January 2013 of cancer.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b c d e Gesine Dornblüth : Khodorkovsky lawyer Jurij Schmidt has died: A loss for the Russian human rights activists , article from January 14, 2013 in the series Europa heute of Deutschlandfunk on dradio.de, accessed on January 16, 2013
  2. ↑ a b c Russian human rights lawyer Jurij Schmidt died at boell.de, accessed on January 16, 2013
  3. ↑ Remembering Yuri Schmidt (1937-2013) at khodorkovsky.com, accessed January 16, 2013
  4. ↑ a b В Санкт-Петербурге умер адвокат Юрий Шмидт , message from January 12, 2013 at lenta.ru (Russian)
  5. ↑ http://www.deutschlandradio.de/gefangener-nummer-eins.331.de.html?dram:article_id=203675
personal data
SURNAME Schmidt, Yuri Markowitsch
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Шмидт, Юрий Маркович (Russian spelling); Schmidt, Jurij; Schmidt, Yuri
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Russian lawyer and human rights activist
DATE OF BIRTH May 10, 1937
PLACE OF BIRTH Leningrad
DATE OF DEATH January 12, 2013
Place of death St. Petersburg