Moscow court tells Cold War civil rights body to shut down
A COURT in Russia has ordered the closure of the country’s oldest human rights group in a landmark decision.
A judge deliberated for 20 minutes at the Moscow city court yesterday before ruling the Moscow Helsinki Group (MHG), set up by Soviet dissident scientists including Nobel peace prize-winner Andrei Sakharov, must shut.
The organisation was founded in 1976 to hold authorities accountable on the international Helsinki Accords that pledged respect for human rights and which the Soviet Union signed up to.
However, MHG founders soon found themselves beng persecuted, jailed or forced into exile. It was revived in the late 1980s with the advent of
– Mikhail Gorbachev’s economic and political reforms in the Soviet Union.
Last year, Russian prosecutors filed a lawsuit against the MHG claiming that it violated its charter by operating across Russia, while the group was technically registered in Moscow.
The Helsinki Group has dismissed the accusations as a pretext to punish it for its work, insisting that human rights are a universal value.
“I’m 80 years old, and I never thought I’d live to see a court hearing decimate human rights activism,” Valery Boshhchev, MHG’S co-chairman, told the court, according to the media outlet Mediazona.
“How can you destroy with such ease what took decades to build?”
Thanks to its long-standing reputation, the group was able to shine a light on human rights abuses in the old USSR and its representatives travelled to remote parts of the country to attend court hearings in politically motivated cases.
Vladimir Putin, the Russian president,
‘I am 80 years old and I never thought I’d live to see a court decimate human rights activism’
for many years invited Lyudmila Alexeyeva, a historian and the group’s long-time chief, to official sessions of his human rights council to hear her grievances.
In 2017, a year before she died at the age of 91, Ms Alexeyeva received a state award for “distinguished service in charity work”.
She then held a tea party for Mr Putin who praised the MHG for its “significant contribution to the strengthening of democratic institutions and civil society” in Russia.