MOSCOW (AFP) — President Dmitry Medvedev pledged Wednesday to work toward making Russia a freer society with a new focus on defence of human rights and free media.
"Our immutable course will be the creation of a free and responsible society, the defence of human rights, freedom of the press and of speech and, of course, supremacy of the law," Medvedev said in a speech in Moscow.
Addressing delegates to an international congress of Russian-language media, Medvedev acknowledged that Russia still struggled with political and social problems but vowed to focus on alleviating them.
"We are in the process of improving our political system," Medvedev said.
The new Russian president said racism, xenophobia and extremism remained serious problems in Russian society and vowed to use law enforcement agencies and the court system to combat them.
"These threats unfortunately are not disappearing," he said. succeeded
"We face them in places where we did not expect them... If we cannot eliminate these phenomena, we must strive to reduce them radically."
Medvedev said this was mainly the duty of the state but added that free mass media also had an important role to play in promoting civil society and fighting xenophobia.
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