By Rachel Pulfer, JHR President
Natalia Arno is smiling. The founder and president of the Free Russia Foundation, Arno is currently in Strasbourg. She’s one of 15 Russian delegates participating in the Council of Europe, a gathering of delegations from 46 countries mandated to uphold human rights, democracy and the rule of law across the continent. (Russia was thrown out of the Council of Europe after the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022. As of January this year, anti-war dissidents like Arno were invited back in.)
Arno worked with the International Republican Institute in Russia from 2004. She led its Russia programs in civic education, grassroots organizing, party building, women and youth leadership, civil society development, and local governance. For her efforts, she was kicked out of Russia in 2012. In exile, she founded the Free Russia Foundation. A non-profit based in Washington DC, the Foundation works to coordinate and support Russian dissidents, community leaders, human rights defenders and journalists, planning for Russia’s future post-Vladimir-Putin.
Today, however, she’s speaking with me about her experiences surviving the campaign of transnational repression that has been waged on her by the Putin regime. This has taken all forms, from cyber-harassment to attempts to freeze her bank accounts to an attempted assassination. That assassination attempt has in turn led to one of the more extreme examples I have encountered of a state trampling on an individual’s right to access information.
One of the leading voices of the Russian opposition, Arno was poisoned in a hotel room in Prague in May 2023, while on a trip to meet with anti-Putin dissidents and donors across Europe. “I came back to my room to find the door ajar,” she recalls, “and a bad smell – like a cheap perfume.” The wastebasket had been emptied, so she figured it was just the hotel staff mid-clean-up. She stayed for a few moments to change, then headed out for dinner. That dinner, she now reckons, probably saved her life; it spared her the most intense exposure to whatever had been sprayed over her things. Arno got back to the hotel room very late. She slept for a few hours, only to wake to an intense pain in her jaw. Concerned she faced some kind of dental emergency, she caught the next flight back to D.C.
On the flight over, the rest of her body started to go numb. “It was as if there was a hand inside me, shutting down my ability to feel my eyes, my stomach, my legs,” she recalls. “It was happening all over my body, the way frost spreads over a windowpane.”
Her husband met her at the airport, at which point she could barely walk. He rushed Arno to the ER to undergo treatment. Other conference participants had by now also reported poisonings, and by 1pm that day, her Board, officials at the State Department, officials in the Senate and the FBI all knew she was in hospital. The FBI cordoned off her floor, and her care included numerous tests from U.S. government divisions responsible for chemical and biological warfare as well as a full body check and an MRI scan.
All this, she thought, was to find out what the poison was, what impact it was having on her body, and what to do about it.
“She was advised to file a freedom of information request to find out what was going on—in her own body.”
Arno emerged from the hospital several days later. But it took until November of that year to identify that she had been poisoned with some kind of nerve agent. The neuropathologist she saw assured her the poison wasn’t Novichok, the agent used on her colleague Alexei Navalny in Germany — but it was something similar. Yet on requesting more precise information from the government officials who had examined her, Arno was told that her health records had been classified by US officials, on the grounds of national security. She was advised to file a freedom of information request to find out what was going on—in her own body.
Waiting for the FOIA took months. It came back, again, classified.
To this day, Arno remains in the dark, both about the full impact of the poison on her health, and about why the U.S. government would choose to classify her personal health information in this way. Her story powerfully illustrates why access to information matters, not just to journalists, but to all of us. This is what it looks like when government overreaches and denies people access to such vital information as what is going on in their own bodies.
Since this time, Arno has been fighting for many more things than her health records. The financial survival of her organization, for one, which lost much of its funding when the administration of Donald Trump came to power. She hasn’t had time or capacity to launch the lawsuit that would now, unbelievably, be required to try and unearth the secret of what poison she ingested, and what impact it is now having. Yet she continues to experience painful symptoms, including numbness across her face and down her arms and legs, numbness that requires special massage devices to restore feeling. All of which makes it two years past time for Arno to be allowed to know what has happened to her own body, and for this information to be made widely available.
It’s not clear who benefits from keeping information about such poisons a secret. What is crystal clear is that not knowing puts us all at risk.