Brown Bag Series- Ensuring Non-Interference, Maintaining Resilient Democracy: Contemporary Challenges in Legislation on Countering Covert Foreign Influence y Maxim Krupskiy

Ensuring Non-Interference, Maintaining Resilient Democracy: Contemporary Challenges in Legislation on Countering Covert Foreign Influence

Nowadays, legislation on countering foreign interference is a double-edged sword—it is successfully used by autocratic and illiberal actors to suppress dissent, while at the same time being developed by many democratic actors as a tool to protect against malicious foreign influence. At times, the rhetoric used by proponents of this legislation on both sides is difficult to distinguish, and its potential risks lie in the details. The purpose of this presentation is to discuss pressing challenges related to the development of legislation on countering foreign interference and, drawing on the case law of the European Court of Human Rights and the expert opinions of the Venice Commission, to attempt to answer the question of how democracies can protect themselves from covert, malicious foreign influence without compromising their resilience.

BIO:

Maxim Krupskiy is a human rights defender, attorney-at-law, research scholar and Ph.D. in Philosophy with more than twelve years of litigation in Russia defending refugees, civil activists persecuted by the Russian authorities, and NGOs labeled as so-called “foreign agents” for political reasons.

He is a former visiting scholar at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University, former non-resident fellow at the The George Washington University and former research scholar at The Kennan Institute of the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars (Galina Starovoitova Fellowship on Human Rights and Conflict Resolution).

Currently he is a research scholar at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He is conducting a comprehensive comparative research on legislation countering foreign interference, specifically the “foreign agent” laws, within the frameworks of autocratic legalism and resilient democracy. He teaches two courses at UIUC: “Contemporary Autocracy in Theory, Law and Practice” and “Transitional Justice.