Pavel Alekseyevich Astakhov (Russian: Па́вел Алексе́евич Аста́хов) (born 8 September 1966 in Moscow) is a Russian politician, celebrity lawyer and television personality.
On 30 December 2009 Dmitry Medvedev named Astakhov as the Children's Rights Commissioner for the President of the Russian Federation (children's ombudsman). He left the job in September 2016 after facing severe criticism due to his comments on the death of 14 children in a shipwreck.
Astakhov graduated from the law faculty of the Dzerzhinsky KGB School in Moscow in 1991. In 2002 he received a Master of Laws from the University of Pittsburgh School of Law. In 2006 Astakhov received a Doctor of Laws in Russia. Firstly the community Dissernet, then the Russian State Library tested his doctoral thesis for plagiarism and discovered that only 0.68% of the text was original work, the remainder having been copy-pasted from other sources.