A Moscow court has ruled that a prominent organization campaigning on human rights issues should be dissolved after prosecutors insisted that it was breaching the country’s laws regulating ‘foreign agents.’
In a ruling on Wednesday, the Moscow City Court said that the Memorial Human Rights Center would be dissolved. Handing down the verdict, judge Mikhail Kazakov said that he would “rule in favor of the claims of the prosecutor’s office to liquidate the inter-regional public organization [Memorial] in full.” Officials allege that the civil society association repeatedly broke the terms of its ‘foreign agent’ status, imposed over links to overseas funding.
The day before, Russia’s Supreme Court ordered that the group’s sister organization, which is dedicated to the memory of the victims of Communist-era repressions, be dissolved as well. Authorities filed applications to liquidate the two entities in November.
During the hearing on Tuesday, the Prosecutor General’s office argued that Memorial had been created in the late 1980s originally “as an organization to perpetuate historical memory, but now it is almost completely focused on distorting historical memory, primarily about the Great Patriotic War,” as WWII is known in Russia.
According to officials, the group “creates a false image of the USSR as a terrorist state” and “attempts to whitewash and rehabilitate Nazi war criminals who have the blood of Soviet citizens on their hands… probably because someone is paying for this.”
Memorial documents the fates of people purged during Soviet leader Joseph Stalin’s ‘Great Terror’ and of those sent to the Gulag prison camps, while the Memorial Human Rights Center campaigns on what it describes as modern civil rights issues. Prosecutors allege that it was using funding from opaque sources and had encouraged unauthorized mass protests.
“Memorial carries out its financial activities in a non-transparent manner; the organization’s reports do not contain complete information on income and expenses,” an official said during the hearing.
Memorial’s chairman, Alexander Cherkasov, has accused authorities of trying to break “the red flashing light” that signals something is wrong, instead of addressing underlying issues, and Memorial’s lawyers have claimed that the prosecution was politically motivated.