Oleg Orlov, one of the founders of the Russian NGO Memorial and co-president of the Memorial human rights centre, was indicted on 29 April. Since March 21, he has been prosecuted, under the new article 280.3 of the criminal code, adopted in March 2022, after the invasion of Ukraine by Russia, punishing by three years in prison. “the repeated public actions aimed at discrediting the armed forms defending the interests of Russia and its citizens as well as international peace and security”.
Since the beginning of the invasion of Ukraine, Oleg Orlov has, on several occasions, posted himself with a sign denouncing the war in a highly symbolic place, opposite the Duma, in a gesture strongly reminiscent of that of Soviet dissidents . He also published an article, “They wanted fascism, they got it”, published in French on the site of Mediapart, which he shared, in Russian, on his Facebook account.
Winner in 2009 of the Sakharov Prize for Freedom of Thought and the Helsinki Group Prize in 2012 for “his historic contribution to the defense of human rights”Oleg Orlov, a biology researcher, began his fight in the early 1980s, producing alone, with the help of a self-made hectograph, posters against the war in Afghanistan, then against martial law in Poland in 1981. In 1988, he was one of the founding members of the “Memorial initiative group”, then, in 1990, of the human rights center Memorial.
A man of the field, of great courage, he worked, from 1991, at the head of the “Hot Spots” program of the center for human rights in the areas of armed conflict, which were multiplying, in Nagorno-Karabakh, in Tajikistan, Moldova, Georgia and the North Caucasus. He documents rights violations and war crimes. At the same time, as an expert for the Human Rights Committee of the Supreme Soviet of the Russian Federation between 1990 and 1993, he contributed to the drafting of laws relating to the humanization of the Russian penitentiary system and the rehabilitation of victims of political repressions, laws widely flouted since.
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In the second half of the 1990s and in the 2000s, Oleg Orlov played a major role in denouncing the war crimes of the Russian army in Chechnya, alongside the great Soviet dissident Sergei Kovalev (1930-2021), who became, after the fall of the USSR, defender of human rights in Russia, a position created in the 1993 Constitution. In June 1995, Kovalev and Orlov negotiated the release of 1,500 hostages taken in the small town of Boudionnovsk by the Chechen leader Shamil Basaev. Once the hostages were freed, they stood in for the hostages to secure their release.
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