Russia: threatened with dissolution, NGO Memorial sounds the alarm
The NGO Memorial is one of the largest civil society organizations in the struggle for the protection of human rights in Russia.
AP - Ivan Sekretarev
Text by: RFI Follow
2 min
Symbol of Perestroika, Memorial, created in 1989 by dissidents including the Nobel Peace Prize winner Andreï Sakharov, is in the sights of the justice system which has called for its dissolution.
Decision on November 25.
The NGO, which initially focused on documenting Stalinist crimes before expanding its activities to protect human rights and political prisoners, especially in the Caucasus, was already classified as a “foreign agent” .
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With our correspondent in Moscow,
Anissa El Jabri
Police car in the street, carefully filtered entrance ... At Memorial, the last public event, the screening of a film on the famine organized by Stalin in Ukraine ended with disturbances by infiltrated nationalists and a police search .
Less spectacular.
It is for breaches of the law on foreign agents that the NGO is threatened with dissolution.
"
This law is written in such a way that it is practically impossible to respect it to the letter,
denounces the lawyer Tatiana Glushkova.
You never know exactly what to report as a production from a foreign agent or not.
"
Some errors and it is the ax: "
The death penalty for not having gone through the nails
", punctuates Alexander Tcherkassov, leader of the human rights branch of the NGO.
►
See also: The Russian public prosecutor's office calls for the dissolution of the NGO Memorial
"A matter of time"
A more general message, also believes Mary Lawlor, UN special rapporteur on human rights defenders: “
I also fear that if Memorial is targeted, it will only be a matter of time before the actors remnants of civil society in Russia are not as well.
"
Nobel Peace Prize winner a few weeks ago, Dmitri Muratov, the editor-in-chief of
Novaya Gazeta,
learned this Wednesday, November 17.
The newspaper was sentenced in his absence and without being warned to 6 fines, again for having failed in the obligation to report "
foreign agents
".
Memorial employees have been under pressure for a long time, especially in the Caucasus.
In 2009 Natalia Estemirova, who was on her staff, was murdered in Chechnya.
►
To listen: Memorial, transmitting the memory of repressions
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