On November 8, Russian prosecutors filed with the court a motion to liquidate two organizations earlier recognized as foreign agents: the International Historical and Educational, Charitable, and Human Rights Society Memorial, and the Memorial Human Rights Center (a member of International Memorial). Both lawsuits claim the organizations must be liquidated for gross violations of the law on foreign agents.
The Memorial Human Rights Center was recognized by Russian authorities as a foreign agent in 2014, and International Memorial – in 2016. A lawsuit to liquidate the rights center was filed by the Moscow Prosecutor’s Office with the Moscow City Court, and a lawsuit to liquidate International Memorial – by the Prosecutor General’s Office with the Russian Supreme Court.
The Moscow prosecutor’s office’s lawsuit against the Memorial Human Rights Center alleges that the organization has repeatedly been held administratively liable for publishing materials on social media without labeling them as those prepared by a “foreign agent.” The lawsuit lists eight administrative cases into such violations, filed in 2019, with the total amount of fines imposed at RUB 1.6 million.
“The organization has shown persistent contempt for law, fails to ensure the publicity of its activities, impedes proper public control over it, which grossly violates the rights of citizens, including to reliable information about its activities,” the Moscow prosecutor’s office wrote in its lawsuit.
At the same time, Memorial’s own lawsuit, filed with the European Court of Human Rights, has for years been awaiting consideration regarding allegations that Russia’s own law on foreign agents violates the European Convention on Human Rights. The defendant in the dispute on behalf of Russia is the Prosecutor General’s Office, which Vladimir Putin this spring entrusted with representing Russia in international courts.
Council of Europe Secretary General Marija Pejcinovic-Buric said on November 12 that the Russian Federation had not responded to repeated calls by the Council of Europe to repeal the law on foreign agents, and that the liquidation of International Memorial would deal a devastating blow to civil society.
Memorial was created in 1987 by a group of like-minded activists to discuss possible ways to perpetuate the memory of victims of Soviet-era political repression. Members of the movement collected signatures to create a monument and memorial complex to the victims of repression, set up street rallies, exhibitions, and scientific seminars on the issue of state terror.
Academician and Nobel Peace Prize laureate Andrei Sakharov became first chairman of the Memorial Council. Jan Raczynski, Memorial’s Chairman of the Board, calls it a peculiar “coincidence” that in the year when the late Sakharov’s 100th anniversary is celebrated, an organization, created with his massive contribution, is being liquidated.
In 1990, Memorial members went on one of the first expeditions to the Solovetsky Islands, from where they brought the Solovetsky Stone, which was bound to later become a monument of the victims of political repression on Lubyanka Square in Moscow. Since 2007, Memorial has been organizing a “Return of Names” rally near the monument – the names of those repressed in the USSR are read out at the event.
In October this year, in the Russian Federation’s capital, a group of unidentified individuals tried to disrupt the screening of the film covering the Holodomor tragedy, “Gareth Jones” by Polish director Agnieszka Holland, which took place in the Memorial headquarters.
