“Everyone wants to continue working, which is simply wonderful. Whether or not we want to enter the new council or not is generally not an issue. That is the prerogative of the elected president. Everyone is considering this situation very sensibly. That is not a secret. First of all, let other people give it a shot… And secondly, I wouldn’t want to be part of the council in the form it’s going to take for a whole set of moral and ethical reasons,” Panfilova explained.

“I think that, considering the changes that are happening in our country, I’m going to be more useful as a civil activist or member of another group of experts,” she added in an interview with Interfax.

The last session of the current council under President Dmitri Medvedev was held earlier in the day on Saturday. The new council will be formed after Vladimir Putin’s inauguration as president on May 7.

The Presidential Council on Human Rights was originally created in 2004 on the order of then-President Putin. Its ostensible purpose is to cooperate with the head of state to uphold laws concerning human and civil rights, inform the president of the state of affairs in that area, facilitate the development of civil society institutions, and to present proposals to the president to further these ends. However, it is a purely consultative body and lacks any authority to implement its own recommendations, and has been criticized as providing the regime with a mere facade of concern for human and civil rights.

In an official blog post on Monday, Senior Vice President and Microsoft General Counsel Brad Smith said that the company was disturbed at news that its own lawyers have possibly been engaged in colluding with the Russian authorities to suppress activists and journalists deemed undesirable by the state. In particular, an article by the New York Times cited a raid on the Baikal Environmental Wave, during which Russian police confiscated a dozen computers under the premise that the group was using stolen Microsoft software:

After the raid, the group reached out to Microsoft’s Moscow office, seeking help in defending itself.

Baikal Wave asked Microsoft to confirm that its software was legal, but the company would not, angering the environmentalists. And Microsoft’s local lawyer in Siberia offered testimony to the police in the case on the value of the software that was said to have been stolen.

Whatever the legitimacy of these claims, said Smith, Microsoft has chosen to err on the side of caution and provide a free blanket software license to all non-governmental organizations in Russia. The license doesn’t even require an application, so all organizations are automatically covered.

Microsoft had previously, in 2008, denied knowledge of practices by the Russian authorities of harassing NGOs and journalists and using the fight against piracy as an excuse. Theoretically, the new blanket license should make it harder for Russian law enforcement to wantonly confiscate computers from advocacy organizations.

Ironically, reports on Tuesday also surfaced that a series of Russian human rights organizations have received letters from regional prosecutors demanding documentation about the groups’ financial and organizational activities. As Elena Panfilova of Transparency International’s Russia branch told Ekho Moskvy radio, the affected organizations include the Center for Development of Democracy and Human Rights, the electoral watchdog Golos, the Moscow Helsinki Group, and Transparency International itself. Why the groups are being examined was unclear, said Panfilova.