Marjorie Farquharson

Marjorie Milne Farquharson (11 August 1953—13 May 2016) was a political scientist and human rights worker.

For over 25 years, she worked on human rights in many contexts, including the United Nations at Geneva and the Council of Europe in Strasbourg. She reported on human trafficking, statelessness, sexual minorities, detention and torture. A fluent Russian speaker, Farquharson covered the Soviet Union from 1978 to 1992. After the breakup of the USSR in December 1991 she dealt with similar issues in Russia, Ukraine and all five Central Asian states.

She also spent a year covering the aftermath of Yugoslavia's disintegration, monitoring human rights violations in Bosnia Herzegovina.

Early life and education Marjorie Farquharson was born in Glasgow on 11 August 1953, one of Nellie Milne and Alexander Farquharson's three children.

Life's Work

Brezhnev, Andropov, Chernenko: Stagnation in the USSR, 1978-1984

In 1978, Farquharson started working with Amnesty International in London as a researcher on the USSR. She was responsible for building up contacts for information among unofficial and official sources and writing Amnesty International's primary research materials on the region, based on her own assessment of the reliability of the material.

A key source of information about human rights violations in the Soviet Union, by reason of its "scope, detail and accuracy", was A Chronicle of Current Events, an underground bulletin "produced regularly in typewritten samizdat form inside the Soviet Union and circulated on the chain-letter principle" between April 1968 and August 1983. It appeared in English from 1971 onwards, but Amnesty had ceased to publish the translated version of the Chronicle when Farquharson joined the organisation.

Over the next six years, she helped oversee the prompt translation and publication of the Chronicle, and made sure that key "missing issues" from 1976 to 1977, which documented the emergence of the Helsinki Groups, and their treatment by the Soviet authorities, also appeared in English, even if at some delay, in January 1979. As those whose fate was documented in the Chronicle and those who gathered the information it published came under increasing pressure, Farquharson's determination to make a wider circle of people aware of what was happening in the USSR — during détente, after the December 1979 invasion of Afghanistan, following the imposition of martial law in Poland (December 1981) — proved wholly justified.

The last issue of the Chronicle appeared in Moscow in August 1983. When she returned to Moscow in 1991 she met many of the dissidents and rights activists described in the pages of the Chronicle; later still she would write their obituaries for the British and Scottish press.

Gorbachev: glasnost and "perestroika", 1985-1992

Farquharson saw the opportunity provided by Gorbachev's perestroika. In a memorandum of July 1989, she first proposed an AI outpost in Moscow and offered to go there herself to set it up. “n two or three years", she warned, "the tides of glasnost may well be turning in the USSR."

She devised Amnesty International's strategy towards the USSR and helped negotiate the organisation's transition towards dialogue with the authorities after 1985, without compromising Amnesty's own position on human rights. In May 1988 there was a meeting in Paris with Fedor Burlatsky, head of the official Public Commission for International Cooperation on Humanitarian Affairs and Human Rights set up by Gorbachev's Politburo. Shevardnadze's Deputy Foreign Minister Anatoly Adamishin came to London in January 1989 and during his stay paid what he called "a symbolic visit" to Amnesty's International Secretariat.

During these numerous preliminary meetings Farquharson secured agreement to the first official publication by Amnesty International in Russian: When the State Kills, a book about capital punishment, appeared in 1989.

In January 1991, Farquharson went to Moscow to set up an Amnesty office, the first time the organisation had a presence anywhere in the Soviet bloc.

Her job took her all over Russia and to each of the five Central Asian States. She undertook numerous research projects for UNDP, UNHCR and Amnesty International and gave her expert opinion on numerous cases involving asylum seekers in the UK. She was a contributor to Radio Free Europe and Index on Censorship.

Farquharson wrote the obituaries of many prominent Russian dissidents for The Independent (London) — Kronid Lyubarsky, Tatyana Velikanova, Larisa Bogoraz, and Leonard Ternovsky, as well as two obituaries for The Herald (Glasgow): of dissident Valery Abramkin and campaigning journalist Anna Politkovskaya.

A member of the Religious Society of Friends and a Quaker registrar, Farquharson oversaw the first religious same-sex marriage in Scotland. Farquharson's work at that time combined her acute perception and entertaining style of writing, it brings together insights of the politics of human rights and observations of the wide range of people she then encountered.

Her love of Russia, its language, culture and people accompanied her throughout her life. She liked reading and translating Russian authors, among them stories by Gogol and Bulgakov, and some of the prose of Osip Mandelstam and Khodasevich. She also translated the painfully honest excerpt about the Gulag from Nadezhda Grankina's "Notes by Your Contemporary" in the 1999 anthology Till My Tale is Told.

Farquharson herself wrote short stories. "The Weather Station" won the BBC World Service's best short story prize in 2000 and was broadcast that year by the World Service.