MOSCOW: Russia´s Supreme Court labelled the Nobel Prize-winning human rights group Memorial “extremist” on Thursday, making it easier for authorities to prosecute its supporters and those who work with it.
Russia liquidated the group´s operations in 2021, forcing Memorial to work largely in exile.
Memorial was founded in the late 1980s to document victims of Soviet-era political repression during which millions of people perished in the Gulag penal system.
Its first chairman was the Nobel Prize-winning Soviet dissident Andrei Sakharov and the group established the largest publicly available database on Gulag victims.
A symbol of hope during Russia´s chaotic transition to democracy in the 1990s, it has since documented the country´s slide into authoritarianism under President Vladimir Putin. It has listed hundreds of political prisoners in modern Russia, among them critics of Putin and opponents of the Ukraine war.
Memorial has also documented rights violations linked to Russia´s brutal wars in Chechnya and Syria, the plight of Ukrainian prisoners of war and kept a list of prisoners persecuted for their religion, including over 200 Jehovah´s Witnesses.
