On Friday, a Russian court closed the Sakharov Center, a well-known non-governmental organization dedicated to preserving the legacy of physicist and Nobel Prize winner, human rights activist Andrei Sakharov, reports Deutsche Welle (DW).
The closure of the human rights group is seen as part of the Kremlin's campaign to crack down on liberal-leaning organizations that challenge the Kremlin's official narratives, including those about Moscow's military campaign in Ukraine.
The Moscow City Court said in a statement that it decided to close the Sakharov Center at the request of the Ministry of Justice for "illegal holding of conferences and exhibitions."
Since its establishment in 1996, the Sakharov Center has hosted hundreds of debates, exhibitions and other events, and in 2015 thousands of people gathered there to pay their last respects to opposition politician Boris Nemtsov, who was killed near the Kremlin walls. In 2014, the authorities declared the Center a "foreign agent" and this year ordered the eviction from the premises.
Andrei Sakharov, who died in 1989, was a key figure in the development of the Soviet hydrogen bomb program, but later became known for his activism to promote human rights and freedoms. He won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1975, but was not allowed to travel to Norway to receive it. In 1980, Sakharov was sent into internal exile, which lasted for six years.
Liquidation of the Memorial
At the end of 2021, the Supreme Court of Russia accepted the lawsuit of the General Prosecutor's Office and on December 28 decided to liquidate the international organization Memorial, officially founded in 1992 in Moscow, which began its work in 1987. One of the organizers and the first honorary president of the Memorial was an academician Andrei Sakharov. The first president of Russia It's Boris Yeltsin was on the Memorial council.
The main task of the Memorial International Historical, Educational, Charitable and Humanitarian Society was the study of political repression in the USSR. Since 1989, over 1.500 monuments to victims of political repression have been erected in Russia, 210 of which are in Moscow.
In Russia, about 300 public figures opposed the shutdown of this organization, including 62 academicians and corresponding members of the Russian Academy of Sciences. In an open letter, they described the liquidation of the Memorial as "an attempt to deprive the nation of its memory."
The Yeltsin Center also spoke out in defense of the Memorial, just like the winners of the Nobel Peace Prize Mikhail Gorbachev and Dmitriy Muratov, who called on the prosecution to settle the case out of court and drop the lawsuit. Nothing helped.
The memorial was liquidated by a court decision due to "systematic violation of the law on foreign agents", which, as Russian officials like to suppress, was adopted in imitation of the law of the same name that has been in force in the USA since the 1930s. According to that law, NGOs that are financed from abroad must state in every published material that it was written by an "organization that has been declared a foreign agent."
JH/FoNet/DW
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