Moscow also wants to shut down Helsinki Group
It is Russia's most glorious association for the defence of human rights. Registered only in the capital, the Ministry of Justice challenges its work on a national scale. Human rights dead and buried in Putin's Russia.
Moscow (AsiaNews) - The Ministry of Justice has gone to court to demand the liquidation of the Helsinki Group in the capital (Mhg, Mekhaghe according to the Russian pronunciation), the most glorious association for the defence of human rights, created in 1976 after the Helsinki Accords, which the Soviet Union also signed the year before. According to the head of the State Council for Human Rights, Eva Merkačeva, 'this is only a formality, as the Moscow group is registered regionally, but actually acts throughout the federal territory, which is rather strange'.
Mhg representatives are actually active in the courts of all regions, although they do not take direct responsibility, but 'offer support' to all those who feel deprived of their rights. The director of the organisation's legal sector, Roman Kiselev, explains that the lawsuit filed was a consequence of an unplanned inspection carried out at the request of the public prosecutor's office in November. The inspectors found a report on the Mhg website about the presence of its members as observers at a trial in the court in Soči on the Black Sea.
Since then, the inspections have been conducted directly by the Ministry of Justice, which found 11 'initiatives' of the Mhg members outside Moscow territory, appearances at trials, complaints about non-admission to courts and seminars with regional partners (mostly online), and an appeal to the St. Petersburg governor to suspend the bans on public demonstrations. A member of the Mhg, Boris Altušer, confirmed that the ministry's basic claim concerns the regional limits of the Mekhaghe, which are to be observed 'according to the statutes', and the violations detected 'make its liquidation inevitable'.
The Mhg is the oldest humanitarian organisation in the country, whose fundamental task is 'to support respect for human rights and the building of democracy in Russia'. The Helsinki Accords of 1975 were a historic cross between Brezhnev repressions and dissident protests, and had a very special international resonance. The US did not trust the Soviets, their translation of the text into Russian and the commitments they intended to make, and the USSR's guarantor was the Holy See, in a special intervention of Vatican Ostpolitik.
Since 1997, now in the midst of the post-Soviet era, the association has published an extensive and detailed annual report on the human rights situation in the country, and since 2009 has awarded the 'Mhg prize' to those dedicated to humanitarian causes, the most prestigious in Russia in this field. In 2017, the group refused all funding from abroad when the first variant of the 'foreign agents' law was passed.
Among the 11 founders was the 'mother of dissent' Ljudmila Alekseeva, who headed the Mhg from 1996 until her death in 2018, after President Putin had visited her the previous year, honouring her on her 90th birthday. On that occasion, Putin thanked her for her 'life spent for others', saying he was convinced that all this time 'she had been taking care of the most important things'.
The president then also attended Alekseeva's funeral ceremony, and today he is preparing to celebrate the final funeral of the entire Russian human rights community, who are also now dead and buried in today's Russia.
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