Just hours after Memorial received the 2022 Nobel Peace Prize, a Russian court ruled that its Moscow offices must be seized. The Tverskoy District Court declared that the headquarters will ‘become state property,’ according to the Interfax news agency.
According to Reuters, the rights organisation was charged of ‘rehabilitating Nazi criminals and degrading authorities and presenting a false image of the USSR’ in Russia. Since its founding in 1989, the organisation has documented Stalinist atrocities; it was abolished in December 2021.
While the organization’s issues persist, Memorial has made it plain that they will not accept offers to relocate outside of Russia and will instead carry on with business as usual there.
The rights organisation had previously shared the Nobel Peace Prize for their work during the conflict in Ukraine with activist Ales Byalyatski, who was imprisoned in Belarus, and the Center for Civil Liberties in Ukraine.
According to Berit Reiss-Andersen, chair of the Norwegian Nobel Committee, ‘We believe that it is a war that is a result of an authoritarian regime, aggressively committing an act of aggression,’
The director of the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, Dan Smith, praised Memorial’s work and asserted that ‘it lives on as an idea that it’s right to criticize power’.
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