The Supreme Court of the Russian Federation on Tuesday, December 28, decided to ban the Memorial International Historical and Educational Society. It was decided to liquidate International Memorial and its regional divisions, DW correspondent reports.
People standing in the street who came to support the organization greeted the court’s decision with shouts of “shame”. According to the Interfax news agency, there are at least 100 people at the Supreme Court. Eyewitnesses told the agency that several people were detained during the day for trying to unfold posters in support of Memorial.
Memorial case
In November, the prosecutor’s office announced its intention to liquidate two structures of the “Memorial”. One lawsuit – about the liquidation of the Memorial educational society – was filed by the Prosecutor General’s Office with the Supreme Court. The second statement – on the liquidation of the Memorial human rights center – was sent by the Moscow prosecutor’s office to the Moscow City Court. The reason for going to court, as indicated in the suit of the Prosecutor General’s Office, was the repeated, gross violations by Memorial of the laws of the Russian Federation and other legal acts, in particular the law on “foreign agents”. In addition, the supervisory agency found that Memorial, with foreign funding, is allegedly engaged in political activities with the aim of influencing government decisions and shaping public opinion.
During the trial, a representative of the prosecutor’s office accused Memorial of creating “a false image of the USSR as a terrorist state and the rehabilitation of Nazi criminals.”
International Memorial rejects the claims of the Prosecutor General’s Office. The organization’s lawyers insist that there are no legal grounds for liquidating the society. Yan Rachinsky, chairman of the organization’s board, has already announced that Memorial will appeal against the court’s decision. “At first, this is an appeal, cassation, an appeal to the Constitutional Court is also quite possible. If necessary, we will appeal to the ECHR, but this is already a distant prospect,” he said.
Nobel laureates supported Memorial
The lawsuits to liquidate the structures of “Memorial” caused a public outcry both in Russia and abroad. The Nobel Peace Prize winners – ex-President of the USSR Mikhail Gorbachev and editor-in-chief of Novaya Gazeta Dmitry Muratov – called on the Prosecutor General’s Office to “withdraw the claim from the court and settle the claims out of court.”
See also:
.