The Memorial Human Rights Center, one of the most prominent human rights organizations, announced its closure Tuesday in a statement published on the Internet.
Russia's Supreme Court ordered the closure of Memorial last December as part of a campaign of legal and administrative attacks against civil society and human rights organizations in the country.
“Today, April 5, 2022, the Memorial Human Rights Center will be liquidated,” says the official statement, which warns that “a return to the totalitarian past is possible, it is happening now, in front of everyone.”
Memorial, one of the oldest human rights organizations in the country, monitors political repressions in modern Russia and has documented crimes in the Soviet Union.
The Office of the United Nations Commissioner for Human Rights, among other human rights monitoring groups, condemned the court's decision to close the centre.
The Prosecutor's Office insisted during the trial that the Memorial Human Rights Center repeatedly violated the requirements of the Russian law on “foreign agents” on its websites and on social networks, to which the NGO responded that it paid in a timely manner all fines imposed for that cause. He also accused her of creating “a false image of the Soviet Union as a terrorist state”.
The Russians awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, Mikhail Gorbachev (1990) and Dmitry Muratov (2021), wrote to the Prosecutor's Office in November to withdraw the lawsuit against Memorial.
Gorbachev and Muratov stressed that Memorial's activities since its founding in 1991 have been aimed at restoring historical justice and preserving the memory of hundreds of thousands of people retaliated during the Soviet Union.
Memorial accuses the Kremlin and the State security organs of trying to prevent it from further investigating crimes committed during the USSR and since 1991, especially since the current president, Vladimir Putin, came to power in 2000.
The NGO, which received the Sakharov Prize from the European Parliament in 2009 and has been a candidate for the Nobel Peace Prize on several occasions, counts among its founders the Soviet scientist and dissident Andrei Sakharov, Nobel Peace Prize in 1975, father of the hydrogen bomb and forerunner of the defense of human rights in this country.
(With information from EFE and AFP)
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