Russia’s most famous human rights organization is threatened with disintegration. The attorney general had applied for the liquidation of the company Memorial International because it violated the requirements for “foreign agents”, Memorial said on their Thursday Homepage. A court will rule on the application on November 25th. “We believe that there is no legal basis to break it up,” the Memorial site continued: “This is a political decision aimed at the destruction of Memorial Society, an organization devoted to the history of political repression the protection of human rights. “
The threat of closure sparked international outrage. In Berlin, Federal Foreign Minister Heiko Maas announced on Friday that the mere idea of smashing memorials would “shake” anyone who is familiar with the “decades-long commitment of this organization for human rights and for coming to terms with political tyranny.” Green leader Annalena Baerbock warned that the organization should not “become the next victim of arbitrary criminalization. With this step, Russia would move further away from the European canon of values.” The Heinrich Böll Foundation, the political foundation of the Greens, declared its protest against the “politically motivated, factually completely unfounded approach.”
One of the co-founders of Memorial was Andrei Sakharov, Nobel Peace Prize laureate.
In Russia, too, the prosecution’s approach is viewed critically. The civil rights activist Nikolai Swanidze, a member of the President’s Human Rights Council, called it a “nightmare” and “shameful”: “This is the oldest human rights organization in Russia,” said Svanidze. He will take action against it. Tikhon Dsyadko, editor-in-chief of the station, which has also been declared a “foreign agent” Doschd ‘, said that to destroy Memorial means to destroy memory: The organization stands for “humanizing society. That concerns all Russians.”
“Memorial” was created during the political awakening of the 1980s. One of the co-founders was the former dissident and Nobel Peace Prize laureate Andrei Sakharov. Dealing with the long-concealed crimes of Stalinism, the Gulag, terror and repression were important issues during the period of perestroika. But Memorial also repeatedly commented on human rights violations, for example in the Chechnya wars, and had described the staff of the opposition politician Alexei Navalny as political prisoners.
Memorial was one of the first organizations to be declared a “Foreign Agent” in 2014. The public prosecutor’s office accuses Memorial of not having made the note “foreign agent” visible in its publications and appearances in advance. Memorial had to pay heavy fines more than 20 times.
Should there be a breakup, the question arises as to what will happen to the Memorial institutions. The organization includes a library, an archive with testimonies, documents and photos of victims of repression, a museum and a database with the names of victims and perpetrators of Stalinist oppression in the 1930s.