Pavel Astakhov

Pavel Alekseyevich Astakhov (; born 8 September 1966 He resigned in September 2016 after facing severe criticism due to his comments on the death of 14 children in a shipwreck.

He has the federal state civilian service rank of 1st class Active State Councillor of the Russian Federation.

Education

Astakhov graduated from the law faculty of the Dzerzhinsky KGB School in Moscow in 1991. In 2006 Astakhov received a Doctor of Laws in Russia. Firstly the community Dissernet, then the Russian State Library tested his doctoral thesis for plagiarism and discovered that only 0.68% of the text was original work, the remainder having been copy-pasted from other sources.

He speaks English, Swedish, Spanish, Chinese, Japanese and French as well as Russian.

Lawyer

Astakhov began practising law in 1991. The court was not impressed by Astakhov's poetry skills and Pope received a 20-year jail sentence; he was later pardoned by Vladimir Putin and was flown back to US.

Vladimir Gusinsky

In 2000–2001 Pavel Astakhov helped Russian media tycoon Vladimir Gusinsky to escape two fraud charges.

On 13 June 2000, Gusinsky was arrested on charges of stealing property worth more than $10 million from the state-owned "Russian Video" company, but three days later, after a petition by Astakhov, Gusinsky was released on bail. Later, Astakhov and another prominent lawyer, Henri Reznik, managed to halt the criminal case against Gusinsky, who flew to Spain. Another case was opened on 17 September, alleging the embezzlement of $300 million from Gazprom, and on 17 November prosecutors reopened the first case. Gusinsky was arrested in Spain on an international arrest warrant on 12 December. On 22 December he was released on bail of 1 billion pesetas ($5.5 million).

Pavel Astakhov and Gusinsky's defence team claimed that the charges were politically motivated, and on 24 April 2001 the Spanish judge Baltasar Garzon declined to extradite Gusinsky to Russia.

Following his role in the Pope and Gusinsky cases, Astakhov was invited to the US to participate in a round table organized by the US Congress. He spent the following year in Pittsburgh completing a Master's in Law.

Saddam Hussein

In December 2003, Pavel Astakhov sent a letter to the US Embassy in Moscow, advising President George W. Bush and Ambassador Alexander Vershbow that he would like to represent the Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein. Asked by a reporter whether he was prepared to defend Saddam Hussein free of charge, Astakhov replied: "I do not think that the former president of Iraq will agree to accept free legal aid". Saddam Hussein, however, did not have a chance to use Astakhov's services.

TV personality and author

In 2003 Astakhov became the host of Chas Suda (Hour of Judgment) which aired on the REN TV channel.

Later Astakhov made a 180-degree turn in his political affiliation and became one of the most prominent supporters of the top leadership of Russia. In November 2007 he founded and headed the national movement Za Putina (For Putin). At the founding conference, Astakhov described the aim of the new movement as follows: "Don't we choose a master in the house? Well, here we are proposing to find a master for the country."

Family Married since 1987a. Spouse, Svetlana Alexandrovna Astakhova (born 13 September 1968) — general producer of several TV programs of her husband: "The Hour of the Trial", "Three Corners", "The Astakhov Case". Has three sons and five grandchildren. On 21 November 2022, one of the sons, Anton Astakhov, was sentenced by the Frunzensky District Court of the city of Saratov to 3.5 years in a general regime colony under part 4 of Article 159 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation (fraud committed by an organized group or on a particularly large scale). According to investigators, Anton Astakhov committed the theft of 75 million rubles from Saratov Nizhnevolzhsky Commercial Bank.

Children's Commissioner

On 30 December 2009 President Medvedev appointed Astakhov as Children's Rights Commissioner for the President of the Russian Federation, (Golovan remained involved in child rights issues and was in 2012 involved in the development of legislation to protect the rights of children in orphanages.)

Astakhov's critics in Russia have accused him of being an opportunist and a publicity seeker. Some child advocacy groups wished him "to pay more attention to protecting the rights of children in Russia and less to PR for himself". In April 2010 Astakhov described child advocacy groups as the "best form of legalisation of the paedophile community".

International Adoption As ombudsman Astakhov sought to raise awareness of the welfare of Russian children adopted by foreign families.

Astakhov was deeply involved in the preparation of the Russian-US treaty on adoption, signed by the US Secretary of State and the Foreign Minister of Russia on 13 July 2011. This treaty bans the independent adoption of Russian children, leaving adoption through agencies as the only option. American citizens who wish to adopt a child from Russia through an agency must pay $40–50 thousand whereas for Russian citizens the procedures are completely free of charge. Moreover, adoptive parents in many Russian regions receive financial aid from the regional authorities, which sometimes amount to RUR 300 thousand (about $10 thousand) per child.

President Medvedev told Pavel Astakhov on 3 December 2011: "There is nothing wrong with foreign adoptions of our children. The fact that foreign citizens do it does not tarnish them in any way, and on the contrary shows their desire to help these children." "We must, as much as possible, keep our children in our country," Astakhov said in April 2010.

In April 2012 Astakhov suggested that Russian citizens should apply to adopt US children, although there were still 665,987 orphans in Russia itself according to the latest statistics and the number of adoptions in Russia had been falling each year since 2007.

In February 2012 Astakhov announced that in the next 5–8 years most of Russian orphanages and boarding schools would be shut down, and their residents adopted by Russian foster families.

Some experts, however, pointed out that Astakhov's reliance on financial incentives had led to an increasing number of children being returned to orphanages. Mizulina said that 30,000 children had been sent back to institutions by their Russian adoptive, foster or guardianship families in the last three years: "Specialists call such a boom in returns a humanitarian catastrophe".

Despite the grave Russian domestic statistics of disruption of adoptions, Pavel Astakhov drew media attention to the case of a 7-year-old, Artem Saveliev (Justin Hansen), who was adopted in 2009 by the Tennessee nurse Torry Hansen, but in April 2010 was sent back to Russia with a note saying that he was "mentally unstable". Astakhov used this case to call for more restrictions on international adoptions in Russia. though she later gave an interview with LifeNews where she stated that she had married Guchigov of her own free will. Although the marriage contravened Russian laws on polygamy and the legal age of adulthood, Astakhov defended the marriage, saying that "sexual maturity happens earlier [in the Caucasus]" and "there are places where women are already shriveled at age 27, and by our standards they look like they're 50." His comments prompted many women to post photographs of their wrinkles under the hashtag #сморщеннаяженщина (#wrinkledwoman). The focus of the issue has since become child marriage, with Astakhov asserting that "you should not be worried about early marriages … but about the early sex life of teenagers. The two need to be kept separate. Romeo and Juliet dreamed of getting married, not of intimate relations."