Memorial - 2009, Russia

Founded to preserve the memory of mass repression under Stalin, Memorial advocates respect for human rights, and protects victims of human rights abuses in Russia and the former Soviet states.

Oleg Orlov, Sergei Kovalev and Lyudmila Alexeyeva were awarded the Sakharov Prize in 2009 on behalf of Memorial and all other human rights defenders in Russia.

Memorial was established in the Soviet Union in the late 1980s with the initial aim of bringing the mass repression under Stalinʼs rule to light and preserving the memory of its victims through research and public events. After the dissolution of the USSR, the organisation became international, with branches and partner NGOs in former Soviet republics and beyond. It has broadened its aims to include monitoring and documenting human rights violations and advocating for and providing legal assistance to victims. Among its founders was Andrei Sakharov. Memorial is made up of many organisations in Russia and 11 other countries. At the end of 2021, the same year the centenary of Sakharov's birth was celebrated in Russia and abroad, the Russian courts ordered the closure of the organisation that he had helped found. However, its members are determined to continue their activities.

Oleg Orlov is among the founding members of Memorial and has been one of its leaders since 1994, as the Chair of the Memorial Human Rights Centre and a member of the board of its international branch. He has collected evidence from and documented abductions during the two Chechnya wars and the later conflict in eastern Ukraine.

Sergei Kovalev, the long-serving chair of the Russian branch of Memorial, was a dissident, political prisoner, human rights activist and politician. In 1991, he helped draft the article on human rights in the new Russian constitution. In 1995, he negotiated the release of 2 000 people held hostage by Chechen rebels in a hospital in the city of Budennovsk. Kovalev criticised the authoritarian tendencies of Presidents Yeltsin and Putin. He publicly opposed Russia's wars in Chechnya, its invasion of Georgia and its annexation of Crimea. He died in August 2021, just a few months before Memorial was closed down.

Lyudmila Alexeyeva was a Soviet dissident and historian. Renowned for campaigning for fair trials for dissidents, she was forced to flee Russia in1977 to and did not return until 1993. Later, as head of the Moscow Helsinki Group, she refused to register the group as a 'foreign agentʼ and kept working for human rights without foreign financing. In 2012, she resigned from the Presidential Human Rights Council as it had little influence. She criticised legislation on foreign agents, the operation of the courts and human rights violations in prisons and opposed the 2014 Russian annexation of Crimea. Alexeyeva died in December 2018 at the age of 91.

Memorial activists have been threatened, imprisoned, abducted and even assassinated over the years. In 2014, Memorial was designated a 'foreign agentʼ. It contested the designation but lost its case. In the last several years, the implementation of increasingly harsh laws on 'foreign agents', 'undesirable organisations' and broadly defined 'extremism' have allowed the Russian authorities to dissolve any civil society organisation that they dislike.

The pressure on Memorial has increased particularly since 2018, when Oyub Titiev, the head of the Memorial branch in Chechnya, was sentenced to three years in prison on bogus charges. In 2020, Yury Dmitriyev, the head of the Memorial branch in Karelia, was sentenced to 13 years in prison on trumped-up charges. Russian courts began to impose numerous fines on various branches of Memorial.

Ignoring the international outcry, including calls from the European Parliament, on 28 December 2021, the Supreme Court of Russia ordered the International Memorial Society and its regional branches to close for violations of the foreign agents law. The next day, the Moscow City Court shut down the Memorial Human Rights Centre. Memorial has appealed these decisions.