The Memorial Human Rights Center has become one of the three Nobel Peace Prize winners. The Nobel Committee announced this today, on October 7.
The Memorial Human Rights Center has won the Nobel Peace Prize together with Belarusian human rights advocate Ales Bialiatski and the Center for Civil Liberties, a Ukrainian human rights organization.
The Nobel Committee wrote on Twitter that Memorial was based on the idea that confronting previous crimes was necessary to prevent new ones. It is also mentioned there that a branch’s head and journalist Natalia Estemirova was killed in 2009 because of her work at Memorial.
In 2018, journalist Ilya Azar interviewed human rights advocate Yan Rachinsky, the International Memorial’s head, specifically for 7x7 — read it here using VPN.
International Memorial is a network of historical and educational organizations including regional branches in Russia, the Memorial Human Rights Center, offices in Germany, Italy, France, the Czech Republic, and Ukraine. The structure of International Memorial in Moscow includes an archive, a museum, a library, and a public space. The organization was repeatedly fined for the lack of the foreign agent label.
The Prosecutor General's Office filed a lawsuit with the Supreme Court of Russia demanding International Memorial’s* liquidation on November 11, 2021. According to the agency, the organization has repeatedly violated the law on foreign agents, releasing content without labeling. The Supreme Court sustained the Prosecutor General's Office’s claim on December 28. The next day, the Moscow City Court annihilated the Memorial Human Rights Center on a similar lawsuit filed by the Moscow City Prosecutor's Office. The organizations appealed against the liquidation, but the court did not side with them.
