The decision to liquidate the oldest human rights organization in Russia, the Moscow Helsinki Group, has entered into force. On Thursday evening, the First Court of Appeals of General Jurisdiction rejected the request of the Moscow Helsinki Group and approved the decision of the Lower Moscow City Court to liquidate the organization. This was reported by the telegram channel of the movement “For Human Rights”.
MHG’s liquidation lawsuit was filed by the Department of Justice, the trial court satisfied it in January. According to the department, the organization has made some “gross” and “deadly” related to the fact that its employees participated in a number of events outside Moscow, while the MHG is a regional organization of Moscow. The lawyers pointed out that the main activity of the organization takes place in Moscow and that the liquidation of the organization is a disproportionate reaction to the violations, even if they were. Human rights activists believe that the decision to liquidate the organization was taken for political reasons.
On the eve of the decision to reject the appeal to the Moscow Helsinki Group, on April 26, the MHG named the winners of the annual human rights award. This is reported “New Newspaper”.
In the nomination “For courage shown in the defense of human rights”, the prize was awarded to Dmitry Ivanov, the creator of the Protest Moscow State University telegram channel, who was sentenced to 8.5 years of prison for an article on the so-called fake on the army. Director Vitaly Mansky, human rights activists Elena Nemirovskaya, Olga Sadovskaya and Pavel Chikov, activist Sarkis Darbinyan, journalist Katerina Gordeeva, one of the founders of the Memorial Society Yan Rachinsky, lawyer Tatyana Okushko and open space organizer Alexandra Krylenkova were also honorees. . The announcement of the winners took place in one of the Moscow cafes.
The MHG was founded by human rights activists and dissidents in the USSR during the reign of Leonid Brezhnev. The creation was announced on May 12, 1976 at a press conference held in the apartment of Academician Andrei Sakharov. The first part of the group included Yuri Orlov, Lyudmila Alekseeva, Mikhail Bernshtam, Elena Bonner, Alexander Ginzburg, Petr Grigorenko, Alexander Korchak, Malva Landa, Anatoly Marchenko, Vitaly Rubin, Anatoly Sharansky.
The organization proclaimed its goal to monitor respect for human rights in the USSR in accordance with the Helsinki Accords. Since its founding, the MHG has been subjected to constant persecution and pressure, its members have been arrested, expelled from the country and deprived of Soviet citizenship. The organization recreated an office in Moscow in 1989, during perestroika. From 1996 until her death in 2018, the organization was led by human rights activist Lyudmila Alekseeva.
The organization aims to promote respect for human rights and the building of democracy in Russia. “We are convinced that Russia will be a democratic state where the laws are respected, where the person, his rights and his dignity are the highest value,” says his website, blocked in February by the decision of the Russian authorities.
In December 2021, the Moscow City Court liquidated another oldest human rights group in Russia, the Memorial Society and its Human Rights Center. The decision was upheld by the Supreme Court in 2022 and has been criticized by international NGOs, human rights groups and Nobel laureates.
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