Tanya Lokshina

When Edward Snowden was landed in Russia, he sent the email to Tanya Lokshina on July 11, 2013 to ask regarding her presence on his closed door meeting with lawyers and representatives of humanitarian organizations. First, when Lokshina saw the email, she thought it was a someone's joke, because Edward Snowden was a world celebrity, she said.

Lokshina was under threat attack in 2012, when she began to systematically receive telephone messages with text detailing events of her private life. She was pregnant that time, and one of the threatening messages was saying: "We are waiting for the birth of your child", other message said that her childbirth wouldn't be "an easy birth." The Human Rights Watch's executive director Kenneth Roth told about the messages: "They knew where she lived, what she was doing. They made explicit reference to the fact of her pregnancy. They threatened harm to herself and to her unborn baby." When HRW appealed about the threats to a number of Russian State securities departments, the messages stopped, albeit later other HRW researcher received another message that an unknown sender had known about a scheduled HRW conference and Lokshina's pregnancy.

Lokshina works a lot to study the situation with women's rights, in 2010 she interviewed women in Chechnya, trying to understand what are the changes in the current North Caucasus. According to her observations, the women of Chechnya have become more restricted in movement, men have begun to commit violence against women more often. She published her observations in the article "Chechnya: Choked by Headscarves" (2010).

She works at Russian office of Human Rights Watch since 2008, that time her researches were about numerous human rights violations in North Caucasus as well as at 2008 war conflict in Georgia. Later she researched situation of political persecutions of individuals in Russia, also violations of human rights in Eastern Ukraine during war conflict.

Lokshina was awarded for her writing in the Moscow online news website "Polit.Ru", — with other three nominees and one winner laureate Anna Lebedeva, — on the 2006 Sakharov prize, — a prize for journalism, established by entrepreneur, former Soviet dissident, Peter Vins.

Lokshina worked for the human rights organization the Moscow Helsinki Group since 1998, where her researches were mostly about the second Chechen war, that began that time; Lokshina documented the Chechen war's abuses, interviewed witnesses and victims of the war. She travelled to Chechnya and Dagestan several times for her human rights work.

Lokshina lived together with parents in the United States since 1990 where she studied journalism. While living in the US, she worked as a freelance for several Russian media. Lokshina later returned to Russia where she was also working as a journalist.

Tanya Lokshina (Russian: Таня Локшина; born 17 June 1973) is a human rights researcher, journalist, and writer from Russia. She is director of the Russia program at Human Rights Watch (associate director for Human Rights Watch’s Europe and Central Asia division). Lokshina is an expert on the human rights situation in the Post-Soviet states.

Tanya Lokshina was born in the City of Moscow on June 17, 1973. She tells about her childhood that when she was in school, there were many prohibitions and punishments for schoolchildren in Soviet Union, but a lot was already allowed, for example, it was forbidden to wear a Christian cross necklace in school, but when she came to school with a cross, administration still didn’t kick her out of school, but her parents in the soviet times often told her how to behave: “Don't, it's dangerous, don't, and why are you showing off? You cannot break this whole stone wall with your forehead."