As the political climate becomes increasingly more repressive in Russia, civil society organizations have come under threat by the government.

A new law requires advocacy oriented non-governmental organizations (NGOs) receiving foreign funding to register as foreign agents, jeopardizing their financial lifeline and reputation. In addition, nation-wide inspections have threatened to suspend activities of organizations advancing and defending democratic practices.

Sevortian has an esteemed career as a journalist and human rights defender. In 2010, Sevortian became the director of the Human Rights Watch office in Moscow. Previously, she was a visiting scholar at Cambridge University and the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars. At present, she is participating in a mid-career course at Harvard's Kennedy School.Anna Sevortian, a 2006 Draper Hills Summer Fellows alumna, comments on the unfolding situation in Russia - reminiscent of Soviet times - and the tough trade-offs Russian NGOs must make to secure their survival in this climate of intimidation. However, Sevortian remains hopeful that the fight for human rights will continue despite these adverse circumstances.

Can you describe the current political climate in Russia?

It is a sad thing to say, but the current political climate in Russia quickly grows more regressive and repressive. Human Rights Watch's 2013 annual report describes it as probably the worst crackdown on fundamental freedoms in the country’s post-Soviet history.

This environment has an immediate toll on the society’s collective thinking and ability to act. For example, the anti-Lesbian Gay Bisexual Transgender (LBST) legislation that bans so-called “LGBT propaganda” literally returns Russia back to the times when homosexuality was a criminal offence.

What is the new foreign agent law?

This bill introduced a requirement for NGOs that receive foreign funding and are involved in any sort of “political activity” (advocacy is the closest English word for the definition given in the law) to formally register as “foreign agents.” For a native speaker of Russian a “foreign agent” means a foreign spy.

The law was passed in July 2012 and this spring there has been a nation-wide campaign of inspections of NGOs, sometimes run in a clearly intimidating manner.

Currently over 60 groups received and are trying to appeal warnings or orders to register. Many of these groups are prominent voices of Russian civil society. According to the law, those who fail to register within six months may be suspended without a court order.

The introduction of the “foreign agent” law brings back the heavily loaded and hateful rhetoric of the 20^th century. This is detrimental to the freedom of thought in Russia.

What is the impact of the “foreign agent” law on NGO activity in Russia?

Since Vladimir Putin’s third presidential term started in May 2012, the authorities acquired broad and often abusive powers to restrict freedom of assembly and association. The new NGO law is only one of the tools used for that purpose.

In addition, Russia’s treason definition was amended and now allows penalization for international human rights advocacy. NGOs are being marginalized and demonized as foreign spies. As we speak, advocacy groups in Russia need to make a tough choice - whether to comply with largely illegitimate laws to survive or, perhaps, see their own demise in the near future. This is possible both due to political or purely financial reasons.

Can you describe your experience leading the Human Rights Watch office in Russia?

Trained as a journalist, I worked for rights organizations for almost all of my life. However, Human Rights Watch was certainly something new - being part of a dynamic, global and highly professional team. As director of the Russia office, I spent a lot of time travelling and conducting advocacy on human rights issues in Russia and Belarus, talking to journalists and doing research. Ensuring the well-being of the Human Rights Watch office in Moscow became all the more significant as the new wave of crackdown on civil society started last summer.

What were some of the issue areas you worked on at Human Rights Watch?

Our priority themes are very much those “on the frontline” and include: Russian civil society, the situation in the North Caucasus, implementation of the European Court of Human Rights’ judgments, migrant workers and more recently – the 2014 Sochi Olympics.

During my time at Human Rights Watch we started research on palliative care and access to morphine for terminally ill cancer patients. Social and economic rights are typically less visible in the Human Rights Watch Russia portfolio and we were glad to take this one on board. In Russia approximately 300,000 cancer and HIV/AIDS patients die every year and only one-fifth of them receive access to adequate pain treatment.

How has Human Rights Watch been impacted by the foreign agent law, if at all?

Human Right Watch’s status in Russia is a representative office of an international NGO. The “foreign agent” law has primarily targeted Russian NGOs. However, for all NGOs - including representative offices - this law stipulates tougher reporting requirements and institutional as well as individual legal and criminal penalties for non-compliance.

Under this new legislation, Human Rights Watch as well as many NGOs were visited by governmental inspectors this spring. Most importantly, the law has affected many of our local counterparts – so the environment we all operate is a very different from one before 2012.

How can the international community intervene - if at all -to help support the efforts of civil society in Russia?

The international community should watch and be vocal about the human rights situation in Russia, especially in the light of the upcoming 2014 Sochi Olympics. It is essential that issues around Russian civil society are raised at every bilateral and multilateral talk with the Russian Federation. Of course, international solidarity actions are crucial for moral support. These days all you need to show solidarity is to go online.

What does all of this mean for the future of human rights in Russia?

It has been a very challenging time for human rights in Russia, a difficult time. However, the human rights groups survived and actually even managed to develop in the Soviet era. Human rights is about strong principles so I believe this work will not discontinue at any given time. Indeed, the scale of it can be diminished. But change in Russia can also happen very quickly.

To learn more about the current situation in Russia, you can follow the Open Democracy Russia series on human rights, which features daily pieces by prominent Russian NGO activists - including former Draper Hills Summer Fellows alumni Yuri Dzhibladze (05) . The series is guest edited by Sevortian and Tanya Lokshina (05) of Human Rights Watch. Please visit: http://www.opendemocracy.net/russia 

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America may have legitimate competitive reasons to worry about the number of computer science and engineering graduates from elite Chinese and Indian universities – the figure dwarfs that of U.S. students with similar degrees.

But a new book by Stanford researchers and others says that the concern that these countries will develop their own centers of high-tech production and innovation and draw research, development and scholarship away from American shores is still premature.

The research, a multidisciplinary look at the growth of higher education in the world's four largest developing economies – Brazil, Russia, India and China (known collectively as the BRICs) – analyzes the quality of institutions, the quantity of people getting degrees and equal access to education.

The book, University Expansion in a Changing Global Economy: Triumph of the BRICS?, is published by Stanford University Press.

"In the past 20 years, university systems in these big countries have just exploded," said Martin Carnoy, a Stanford professor of education and one of the authors. Carnoy is also an affilate of the Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies.

"So the questions are why did it happen and what are the implications? And specifically, what are the implications for the U.S. if the market is flooded with new scientists and engineers? Are we going to be overwhelmed? What happens to their societies if all the energy is focused on elite institutions," Carnoy said.

The researchers approached their questions with the belief that societies, and governments, can be judged by the way they invest in and organize their public higher education systems.

For example, how well these countries create a labor force that is competitive in the information age depends on the quality of higher education. Whether people have equal chances to succeed relies on having colleges that are accessible to even the poorest students. And how effectively a country expands its university system may determine how successful it is at growing a robust economy and competing with the United States and Europe, the scholars argue.

"If you have economic growth and provide educational opportunities, you're perceived as a legitimate, successful government," Carnoy said. "So our theory was, if you can pull this off, if you can successfully expand your university systems, you are likely a pretty efficient government."

BRIC undergraduate education increased from about 19 million students in 2000 to more than 40 million students in 2010. The largest increase was in China, which went from less than 3 million to almost 12 million bachelor's degree students during that period, the study says.

Financing elite schools

The study found that BRIC countries are pouring money into their elite colleges in an effort to create world-class institutions and have their graduates compete with the United States and Europe.

Researchers say the elite colleges are much better for the focused investment, and the engineers and computer scientists are graduating with similar competency and training as those from developed countries.

But the mass institutions are receiving fewer resources, the study says, and that's where most of the students go. In 2009, 2.1 million of the 2.5 million total bachelor's graduates in China matriculated from mass institutions, not elite ones. In India, it was 2.2 million of 2.3 million.

This widening funding gap between top schools and mass institutions has broad implications, the scholars argue. The gap has the potential to slow economic growth domestically, deepen income inequality and create less social mobility.

Students who go to the mass institutions aren't getting high quality, competitive educational experiences, the study says, and many of the students also get stuck with big bills as funding assistance is directed toward the elite universities.

"What happens, then, is they are doing a good job of educating students at the elite levels, but they are not doing a good job of educating students at the non-elite levels who are also fundamental for the economy," said Prashant Loyalka, a research fellow at FSI and one of the study's authors.

In absolute terms, the sheer numbers of students graduating from elite institutions in computer science and engineering majors in these countries is also high. In China, for example, the total number of computer science and engineering graduates from elite universities is more than the total number of such graduates from the United States.

But sustaining and building innovation hubs requires more than the elite, the researchers said. The engine of these new economies is the rest of the population – those that attend mass institutions.

"In the United States, we have relied on competent second-tier engineers. They are the guts of our system. We need good students in all fields in these second-tier universities because the top-tier universities just don't produce that many graduates. They simply don't," Carnoy said.

He warned that this redistribution of funds away from second-tier institutions is a concern in the United States as well. "To an extent the BRICs have to do it, because they don't have enough resources to go around. But do we have to do it? The answer is probably no. It certainly should be no," Carnoy said.

The research is one of the first empirical and comparative looks at the higher education systems across these countries, and relied on in-country interviews, surveys, data analysis and classroom observation.

Report card

Overall, the researchers found that significant challenges remain as these countries march toward creating universities that can rank alongside those in the United States and Europe.

China, the scholars said, is doing pretty well, but Russia and Brazil are question marks.

"Russia has provided the vast majority of its people with a high level of education, but it has lagged in terms of putting money into research," Loyalka said. "Brazil has a high-level of graduate education and research at its top-tier public institutions, and these institutions are receiving a lot of support. However, the vast majority of students attend private institutions, which are, on average, of dubious quality."

India, Loyalka noted, was surprising. Despite its very good technical universities, he said, "you have a small proportion of Indians going to those, and the mass institutions are of really poor quality."

"The higher education system in India does not appear to be well organized," Loyalka said.

Among other recommendations, the researchers said India should increase its graduate education and, along with Russia, increase spending on research.

The project began in 2007 as an interdisciplinary venture supported by FSI, and incorporated scholars in economics and international comparative education at Stanford Graduate School of Education, FSI and universities in Moscow and Beijing.

Several articles focusing on different aspects of the review also have been published over the past year. The most recent, which appears in the July/August issue of the journal Change, highlights the research on quality and quantity of graduates in engineering and computer science from the four countries.

Besides Carnoy and Loyalka, the scholars involved in the project include Maria Dobryakova, a research associate and the director for portals at the Center for Monitoring Quality Education at the Higher School of Economics in Moscow; Rafiq Dossani, a senior economist at RAND Corp. and former senior research scholar at Stanford's Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center at the Freeman Spogli Institute; Isak Froumin, a mathematician and director of the Institute for Educational Studies at the National Research University Higher School of Economics in Moscow; Katherine Kuhns, who received her PhD in the International and Comparative Education Program at Stanford Graduate School of Education; Jandhyala B. G. Tilak, a professor at the National University of Educational Planning and Administration in New Delhi, India; and Rong Wang, director and professor of the China Institute for Educational Finance Research at Peking University.

Brooke Donald is the social sciences writer at the Stanford News Service.

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