Today in Moscow, in the Journalists’ Centre there will be the 2009 ceremony for distribution of Moscow Helsinki Group prizes in the sphere of human rights protection.

   One of the prize winners is head of the Interregional NGO “Committee Against Torture” Igor A. Kalyapin.
Mr. Kalyapin has been awarded the prize “For successful human rights NGO development and management”. This award, certainly, means that the efforts the Committee Against Torture head to create a professional and modern human rights NGO have been appreciated. He has managed to establish an organization that for more than 9 years has been protecting human rights, fighting police abuse, struggling with the ineffectiveness of official investigations, winning cases in courts, including at the level of the ECtHR.

In other nominations human rights prizes have been awarded to Natalia Estemirova, Galina Kozhevnikova, Yury Shevchuk, Alexey Sokolov, Andrey Yurov, Alexander Daniel, Elena Milashina, Rauf Gabidulin, Sergey Belyayev and Andrey Babushkin.