Center for Civil Liberties on Nobel Prize: “We document pain”

The Ukrainian Center for Civil Liberties sees the Nobel Peace Prize as a tribute to all Ukrainians who fight for freedom. It is not met with joy from everyone in the country – including the government.

The entire team came out for the first public appearance after the announcement, and the staff applauded – all dressed in white hoodies with the words Center for Civil Liberties on it. The director of the Ukrainian human rights organization, which won the Nobel Peace Prize, Oleksandra Matviychuk, on the other hand, wore a blue dress.

She began by emphasizing: “They say that the Ukrainian people should have received this award. And that’s exactly what happened, because the greatest strength of our organization is that volunteers play the leading role. The Nobel Peace Prize is awarded to all people in Ukraine who fight for freedom with all your senses.”

2014 human rights violations documented

Matviychuk again called for fundamental reform of international organizations such as the UN, which should protect people better, and looked back at the beginning of the Russian occupation of Ukraine in 2014. The non-governmental organization was the first to send mobile teams to the regions around Luhansk and Donetsk in eastern Ukraine and to Crimea to document Russian war crimes.

Since the start of the major Russian invasion in February of this year, she has founded the “Putin Tribunal”, which has now documented more than 21,000 cases of war crimes.

Matwijtschuk found out that she would receive the Nobel Peace Prize on a business trip to Poland, which she made together with the managing director Oleksandra Romantzowa. In Warsaw they were just boarding the train back to Kyiv when the phone rang. 20 minutes before the official announcement, says Romantsova.

“At first I thought that my English wasn’t good enough and that I didn’t understand, but she clearly repeated that she is the chair of the Nobel Committee and that our organization is awarded the Nobel Peace Prize along with others,” Romantsova said. “And that they very much hope to see us in Oslo, because the Nobel Prizes are not awarded in Stockholm, but in Oslo. We look forward to being there in December.”

Criticism of award by Ukrainian government

The Ukrainian Center for Civil Liberties receives the award together with the imprisoned Belarusian human rights activist Ales Byaljazki and the Russian human rights organization Memorial. The fact that the Ukrainian organization received the Nobel Peace Prize together with organizations from the aggressor country Russia and its ally Belarus met with criticism in Ukraine.

President Zelenskyy has not yet congratulated them, Matviychuk said. After the announcement of the award, Zelenskyi advisor Mykhailo Podoljak tweeted, among other things, that the Norwegian Nobel Prize Committee had a strange understanding of peace when representatives of two countries that had attacked a third were jointly awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. Neither the Russian nor the Belarusian organization could have organized resistance to the war against Ukraine.

Solve problems that have no national borders

The joint Nobel Peace Prize is by no means an old narrative about the brotherly peoples of the Soviet Union, Matviychuk commented on this attitude. “This is a story about standing up to a common evil, it’s a story about human rights activists in different countries building horizontal links with each other to solve problems that have no national borders,” Matviychuk said.

Ukraine is being threatened by Belarus because Belarusian human rights organizations such as Vyasna and Ales Byalyatsky, who has been imprisoned for the second time, have not been heard, Matviychuk said. Its organization, founded in 1996, monitored elections and showed the whole world that such would not take place under ruler Lukashenko. The world community should have paid attention earlier. Today, according to Vjasna, there are more than 1,300 political prisoners in Belarus; Lukashenko is “Putin’s assistant”.

Recognition for Russian organization Memorial

Matviychuk also once again expressed her great appreciation for the Russian human rights organization Memorial. In 1987 – still in Soviet times – they founded an organization to make all the repression and atrocities of the Stalin era visible. In doing so, they had done what the Soviet Union feared most.

Matviychuk is pleased that the fight for human rights and the democratic transformation of her and other countries is getting attention, because this fight is far from over. “We document pain and sometimes it seems to me that this pain just burns us.”