Valery Borshchyov

Valery Vasilyevich Borshchyov (, alternatively transliterated Valery Borshchev; He graduated from the Faculty of Journalism at Moscow State University. He started actively protesting against Soviet policy in 1973, and was inspired to do so due to the prosecution of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. He became actively involved in human rights work after he met Andrei Sakharov in 1975; Borshchyov's work led to him being banned from practicing journalism. During the 1980s, his actions as a dissident grew, he was harassed and beaten by the authorities and his work was labeled as "anti-Soviet propaganda" by the KGB.

According to the Moscow Helsinki Group, he helped evacuate women and children from combat areas during the First Chechen War. In 1995, Borshchyov volunteered to take the place of a hostage during the Budyonnovsk hostage crisis. In 2009, he was elected to serve as head of the Public Oversight Commission (POC). In this capacity, he led the team that used forensic evidence to prove that Sergei Magnitsky was murdered while in police custody, and did not die, as officially claimed, by a heart attack. Following the murder of Magnitsky, Borshchyov also underlined that a series of articles about the murder published in the New York Times ameliorated the situation and hoped the interest of the press might help bring the perpetrators to justice. Borshchyov spoke out against growing human rights abuses in Russia, stating in 2012 that Russia had entered "a new era of Stalin-like repressions". In 2017, he was awarded the Magnitsky Human Rights Award for Outstanding Human Rights Activist.