Pavel Vasilievich Sulyandziga ( born 20 February 1962 in Olon,

Pozharsky District Pozharsky District () is an administrativeLaw #161-KZ and municipalLaw #191-KZ district (raion), one of the twenty-two in Primorsky Krai, Russia. It is located in the northern and northwestern parts of the krai and borders with Khabarovsk Krai i ...

Primorsky Kray Primorsky Krai, informally known as Primorye, is a federal subject (a krai) of Russia, part of the Far Eastern Federal District in the Russian Far East. The city of Vladivostok on the southern coast of the krai is its administrative center, an ...

) is a Russian indigenous rights activist of Udege nationality. He is a member of the UN Working Group on the issue of human rights and transnational corporations and other business enterprises, tasked with the dissemination of the

UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights The United Nations Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights (UNGPs) is an instrument consisting of 31 principles implementing the United Nations' (UN) "Protect, Respect and Remedy" framework on the issue of human rights and transnational co ...

and a former member of the

Public Chamber of Russia The Civic Chamber of the Russian Federation (), sometimes shortened to Civic Chamber (), is a consultative civil society institution with 168 members created in 2005 in Russia to analyze draft legislation and monitor the activities of the parliame ...

Until 2010, he was the first vice-president of the

Russian Association of Indigenous Peoples of the North The Russian Association of Indigenous Peoples of the North (RAIPON) () is the Russian national umbrella organisation representing 40 Indigenous small-numbered peoples of the North, Siberia and the Far East as well as the Komy-Ishma people. It is ...

(RAIPON) and member of the

United Nations Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues The United Nations Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues (UNPFII or PFII) is the UN's central coordinating body for matters relating to the concerns and rights of the world's indigenous peoples. There are more than 370 million indigenous peop ...

Sulyandziga's home region is the Bikin River valley, located in close proximity to the

Sikhote-Alin Nature Reserve Sikhote-Alin Nature Reserve (, , ) is a Russian 'zapovednik' (strict nature reserve) in Primorsky Krai. It is a reserve for the endangered Siberian tiger. It was founded on February 10, 1935, to protect a population of the sable. The Sikhote-Ali ...

, which was designated UNESCO World Heritage in 2001. The Bikin valley is covered with dense forest and constitutes an important habitat for the

Amur tiger The Siberian tiger or Amur tiger is a population of the tiger subspecies '' Panthera tigris tigris'' native to Northeast China, the Russian Far East, and possibly North Korea. It once ranged throughout the Korean Peninsula, but currently inhab ...

. During the late 1980s, Pavel Sulyandziga lived in the village of Krasny Yar, where he was successful in mobilizing the population against the administration's plans to grant timber harvesting licenses to a Soviet-Korean joint venture led by

Hyundai Hyundai is a former South Korean industrial conglomerate ("''chaebol''"), which was restructured into the following groups: * Hyundai Group, parts of the former conglomerate which have not been divested ** Hyundai Asan, a real estate construction ...

. Since then, he has remained one of the most outspoken indigenous rights activists in the Russian Federation. Since 1999 he has been co-editor of the magazine "The World of Indigenous Peoples - Living Arctic" (). In 2011, he was elected a member of the UN working group on human rights, transnational corporations and other types of business from the Eastern Europe region for three years. In August 2012, with the participation of Sulyandziga and with the assistance of the Russian authorities, the evacuation of the seriously ill and isolated from the public world chess champion

Boris Spassky Boris Vasilyevich Spassky (; January 30, 1937 – February 27, 2025) was a Russian chess grandmaster who was the tenth World Chess Champion, holding the title from 1969 to 1972. Spassky played three world championship matches: he lost to Tigra ...

from Paris to Moscow was planned and carried out. In 2014, he was not released from Russia for the UN conference in the United States on indigenous peoples (according to Sulyandziga, a border guard tore a page from his passport and then declared that it was invalid). In 2016, he was nominated by the Yabloko party as a candidate for the

State Duma The State Duma is the lower house of the Federal Assembly (Russia), Federal Assembly of Russia, with the upper house being the Federation Council (Russia), Federation Council. It was established by the Constitution of Russia, Constitution of t ...

on the regional list from Primorsky Krai, as well as in a single-mandate constituency. In 2017, he asked for political asylum in the United States.

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Sulyandziga, Pavel 1962 births Living people People from Primorsky Krai Indigenous rights activists Russian activists Members of the Civic Chamber of the Russian Federation Yabloko politicians Tungusic peoples People listed in Russia as foreign agents