“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.

Mikhail Fedotov, secretary of the Russian Union of Journalists, was picked by the president on Tuesday to head the Presidential Civil Society Institution and Human Rights Council, as well as to be the president’s human rights advisor.

Fedotov has spoken out on numerous occasions in defense of freedom of the press and many other rights issues, but alo worked as federal press minister prior to his job in the Union of Journalists – a possible cause of concern for some rights activists. At the same time, Fedotov was also a member of opposition leader Garry Kasparov’s Free Choice 2008 committee, which issued a critical declaration of then-President Vladimir Putin, accusing him of crippling democratic freedoms and turning Russia into an autocratic state.

While most Russian human rights activists were positively surprised by Fedotov’s appointments, some took a more critical approach.

“Fedotov isn’t just a rights activist, he’s also a former bureaucrat of the first order, with all the attributes,” Kirill Kabanov of the National Anti-corruption Committee told Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty. “I don’t understand whether his appointment is a promotion for the council or something else.”

Organizers of the Strategy 31 campaign in defense of free assembly immediately appealed to the new rights advisor to help solve the ongoing conflict between opposition activists and the Moscow city government over Triumfalnaya Square. Rallies held on the square have been routinely denied government sanction and brutally cracked down on by city law enforcement. On August 16, 2010, the authorities announced that the square would be closed until 2012 pending the construction of a massive underground parking garage, and issued a blanket ban on public events. Some opposition leaders have been attempting to get Triumfalnaya Square status as a UNESCO World Heritage Site, thus preventing the construction, which they see as a ploy to prevent opposition protests.

In response, Fedotov promised to resolve the issue.

“I’ll try to do everything to ensure that this conflict disappears from the realm of public attention,” he told Interfax on Wednesday.

Fedotov said that conflicts do not exist to be stirred up, but to be settled. “How it’s going to be done, I’m not yet ready to say. I’m ready to use all possible means to get rid of this conflict. We need there to be less conflicts, not more,” he asserted.

However the issue is resolved, UNESCO is unlikely to play a role.

“As a former ambassador to UNESCO in Russia, I can say that the process of getting one site or another onto the UNESCO World Heritage List takes no less than five years,” Fedotov told Gazeta.ru. “Before getting onto that list, a site is first [put] onto a waiting list, and other procedures are carried out. We’re going to resolve the issue of Triumfalnaya Square much sooner.”

In light of the revelations that last month’s suicide bombers were both natives of the North Caucasus Republic of Dagestan and young widows of deceased militants, Pamfilova spoke about what she saw as the reasons why such young Caucasians would turn to violence. Noting that she had just returned from a trip to the region, the rights activist said that young people in the Caucasus were confused and lacked direction as a result of unemployment, nonsensical social policy, and a lack of public control in the region. She also blamed Russian special forces for failing to consider the consequences of some of their tactical operations, which can often tear entire families apart and leave the survivors without a place to live.

“This is an intellectual war, and therefore there should be a stress in the region not of a nonsensical nature, but of an intellectual one. This is precisely the way that the intelligence agencies must win the war against terrorist ideologues,” Pamfilova said.

She also stressed that the main source of the region’s social ills was widespread, endemic corruption, which would not be possible, she said, without the support of the federal authorities. “We will never eliminate corruption in the North Caucasus if large amounts of money sent there are being ‘skimmed’ by officials in Moscow,” Pamfilova said at the press conference.

The Civil Society Institution and Human Rights Council was created in 2004 by then-President Vladimir Putin, with the ostensible goals of informing the president of the state of human rights and freedoms in the country and to create proposals to further the development of those same rights. It currently consists of thirty-six representatives from a variety of public organizations, including former Soviet dissident and prominent rights activist Lyudmila Alexeyeva. The last meeting in November focused on fighting corruption, specifically within Russia’s law enforcement agencies.