The Russian non-governmental organization Memorial, banned in Russia, denounced the trial against it on Friday, October 7, when it had just been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize alongside Belarusian lawyer and human rights defender Ales Bialiatski and the Center for Civil Liberties in Ukraine.
“The minute the whole world congratulates us on the Nobel Prize, a trial is being held in the Tverskoy Court [de Moscou] to seize the premises of Memorial”denounced the organization, a reference in the struggle for freedoms and the memory of political repressions in Russia and the USSR.
Victim of the repression she denounces
The emblematic NGO shed light for three decades on the Stalinist purges, then the repressions in Vladimir Putin’s contemporary Russia, before falling victim to them herself.
Last winter, the Russian justice had pronounced the dissolution of Memorial for violations of a controversial law on “foreign agents”, a decision that shocked both the West and Russia and sparked an avalanche of condemnations. The dissolution of this pillar of Russian civil society, symbol of the democratization of the 1990s after the collapse of the USSR, had preceded the offensive in Ukraine by a few weeks.