In front of the Supreme Court in central Moscow, demonstrators chanted “Shame, shame”.
Image: Imago
Russia orders the dissolution of Memorial International. The Kremlin is trying to damage the reputation of human rights defenders. Before the end of the year, Putin seems to want to silence as many critics as possible.
KBefore the decision to dissolve Memorial International was announced, dozens of Russians chanted “Shame, shame” in front of the Supreme Court in central Moscow. The young among them had not yet been born when the human rights organization began work on a memorial for the victims of Soviet state terror in the late 1980s. Now, according to the will of the court, which is generally understood to express the will of the Kremlin, they should do without Russia’s oldest and most important human rights organization.
The judge Alla Nazarova formally appealed to the General Prosecutor’s office. This was collected last month and relates to “systematic” violations of the “Foreign Agents” Act, which provides for marking obligations. Memorial had rejected the law from the start, but, as a precaution, had given his publications the defamatory stigma linked to Soviet dictator Stalin’s image of the “enemy of the people”. Nevertheless, the organization was punished for not making self-accusations in social networks and databases, about the obligation to mark them, but nothing had been said before.