2023-06-08 15:16:00
Responding to the start of the trial in Moscow against Oleg Orlov, a prominent human rights defender accused of the newly instituted “crime” of “repeatedly discrediting” the Russian armed forces and who risks up to three years in a penal colony , Natalia Zviagina, Director of Amnesty International Russia, said:
“Oleg Orlov has been put on the bench solely for writing an anti-war article denouncing Putin’s Russia as a totalitarian fascist society. Unsurprisingly, the system he described cannot tolerate Orlov’s need to defend the truth and his refusal to remain silent after Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine. The price he and others are paying for exercising their right to free speech in today’s Russia is truly high.”
“Oleg Orlov has been fined twice for mounting anti-war pickets that were deemed to have ‘brought into disrepute’ the Russian armed forces. The Russian authorities have dissolved Memorial, the human rights organization of which Oleg Orlov was a prominent member, and are now filing criminal charges against him. Neither Oleg Orlov’s impeccable reputation as a defender of human rights nor the recent Nobel Peace Prize awarded to Memorial have deterred them.”
“Amnesty International calls on the Russian authorities to immediately drop all charges against Oleg Orlov. The authorities must also end the repression of civil society organizations and human rights activists, and must respect the right to express opinions freely, even if those opinions include criticism of the Russian invasion of Ukraine. ”
On June 8, the Golovinsky District Court in Moscow began examining the criminal case against Oleg Orlov, vice president of the Memorial Human Rights Center, a Nobel Peace Prize-winning organization; Orlov is accused of “discrediting the Russian Armed Forces” (article 280.3.1 of the Criminal Code). The charges were filed after his article “They wanted fascism. They had it” was published by the French edition of Mediapart in November 2022.
Oleg Orlov had previously been charged twice with “discrediting the Russian Armed Forces” and fined a total of 65,000 rubles (US$880) for anti-war picketing in Moscow in March and April 2022. These administrative sanctions paved the way for his criminal prosecution.
The Memorial Human Rights Center, of which Orlov is a member, was dissolved by the Supreme Court in February 2022, in violation of the right of association, and several of its staff have faced criminal charges since then. In December 2022, the human rights group was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, along with the Center for Civil Liberties (Ukraine) and human rights defender Ales Bialiatski (Belarus).
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