R.The US Supreme Court has ordered the dissolution of the human rights organization Memorial. According to the Interfax agency, the judges upheld a request by the General Prosecutor’s Office for violating Russian law on Tuesday. Memorial denies the allegations and denounces political persecution. As Memorial explained in the messenger service Telegram, the decision also banned the regional sub-organizations of Memorial International.
Several dozen protesters protested the trial outside the Moscow courthouse on Tuesday, despite freezing temperatures; there were several arrests. After the verdict was announced, videos show the crowd shouting “shame, shame” in front of the court. The group’s lawyer, Tatiana Gluschkowa, told CNN after the verdict that the group would appeal the decision.
What is the real reason for the closure?
“The real reason Memorial was closed is because prosecutors don’t like Memorial’s work in rehabilitating victims of Soviet terrorism,” the lawyer said. Memorial chairman Jan Ratschinsky announced that he would take action against the judgment at the European Court of Human Rights.
Memorial is one of the most important civil society organizations in Russia. The organization, which was co-founded by the Soviet dissident and Nobel Peace Prize laureate Andrei Sakharov in the late 1980s, campaigns to come to terms with the political persecution and Stalinist terror in the Soviet Union, but also to uphold human and civil rights in today’s Russia.
The Russian authorities accuse Memorial of violating the so-called foreign agent law. Organizations in Russia classified as “foreign agents” must label all publications and disclose their sources of funding. Critics see the law as an instrument used by the Kremlin to suppress independent voices in Russia.
Observers see the crackdown on Memorial as an attempt by the Russian leadership to reinterpret Soviet history. While Memorial wants to create memorials for the victims of Stalinism, the Kremlin commemorates Stalin above all as a war hero and conqueror of National Socialism. Coming to terms with the way Memorial does it is seen as an attack on this historical image.
Arsenij Roginsky, who headed Memorial from 1998 onwards, described to the FAZ two and a half years before his death at the end of 2017 how Vladimir Putin was using “Stalinist stereotypes” to legitimize his rule: “We are the best and the fairest,” the historian summed up the message, “and have done nothing but good for the people around us. But enemies abroad and at home want to harm us and bring us to our knees. ”
The state terror, to which millions of its own citizens fell victim, did not fit into this black and white conception: the Soviet Union, as a state that had defeated absolute evil in 1945, could not act in a terrorist manner. Instead, anyone who criticizes the Russian state and its leadership is considered evil. In a speech earlier this month, Putin accused Memorial of repeatedly supporting groups that are blacklisted as “terrorist and extremist organizations”. “The violations were obvious,” he said.
Amnesty International spoke of the verdict as “a severe blow to Russian society, the societies of its neighboring countries and all of Europe”. Like no other organization, Memorial stands for an open, philanthropic, democratic Russia that seeks reconciliation within its own society and with its neighbors.
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