A woman walks past the entrance of the Memorial Human Rights Center in Moscow, 7 October 2022. Photo: EPA / Maxim Shipenko
The Russian Justice Ministry has placed the Nobel Peace Prize-winning Memorial Human Rights Centre on its list of “undesirable” organisations, independent Russian radio station Ekho FM reported on Wednesday.
An undesirable organisation cannot legally continue to exist in Russia and must dissolve itself immediately, while any Russian citizen cooperating with an “undesirable organisation” is liable for a fine for a first offence, while a second offence can result in a custodial sentence. Novaya Gazeta Europe was deemed an “undesirable organisation” in June 2023.
Originally founded to document historic repression and human rights abuses during the Soviet Union’s perestroika era in 1987, Memorial was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2022 for its “outstanding effort to document war crimes, human right abuses and the abuse of power”, despite the fact that the organisation itself had by then been liquidated in Russia on the orders of Russia’s Supreme Court.
The international Memorial Human Rights Centre was set up in Switzerland in 2023 by staff members of the Russian NGO in exile, though its Russian members continued to be persecuted despite the group’s disbanding.
Memorial’s co-chair, Oleg Orlov, was handed a two-and-a-half-year prison sentence for “discrediting the Russian military” in February 2024, though he was ultimately swapped in the largest ever prisoner exchange between Russia and the West in August 2024 and is now living in exile.
The neo-liberal British think tank The Henry Jackson Society and Russian NGO Arctida, which investigates climate change, kleptocracy, and Indigenous rights in the Arctic, were among the other organisations added to the Justice Ministry’s list of groups deemed “undesirable”.
Upon learning the news of its new status, Arctida announced that it would be ending any projects it had undertaken in Russia, as well as all cooperation with people and organisations located or registered in Russia.
