Professional Affiliation

Senior Lawyer, Memorial

Expert Bio

Grigory Vaypan is a Russian human rights lawyer and scholar. He is a Senior Lawyer at Memorial, Russia's oldest human rights group and laureate of the 2022 Nobel Peace Prize.

At Memorial, Grigory carries out litigation, legal research, and legal advocacy on transitional justice in Russia.

Grigory has more than a decade of strategic litigation experience before the Constitutional Court of Russia and the European Court of Human Rights, including as an amicus curiae. He is the recipient of the 2022 Moscow Helsinki Group Human Rights Award for defending human rights in court. Most recently, Grigory has been involved in the legal defense of Russian citizens prosecuted for protesting against Russia’s war in Ukraine.

Grigory holds his first law degree from Moscow State University, a LL.M. from Harvard Law School, and a Ph.D. in International Law from Saint Petersburg State University.

Expertise

International Law, Human Rights, Rule of Law, Constitutional Law

Wilson Center Project

Constitutional Justice in Russia: What Went Wrong and How We Can Make It Right

Major Publications

Hard to Be a God: the Russian Constitutional Court and its First Case on Enforceability of a Judgment of the European Court of Human Rights, 4(113) Comparative Constitutional Review (2016) (in Russian)

Choosing Among the Shades of Nuance: the Discourse of Proportionality in International Law, 15(2) Global Jurist (2015)

Acquiescence Affirmed, Its Limits Left Undefined: the Markin Judgment and the Pragmatism of the Russian Constitutional Court vis-à-vis the European Court of Human Rights, 2(3) Russian Law Journal (2014)