The Moscow City Court has ruled in favor of a Justice Ministry motion to dissolve the Moscow Helsinki Group (MHG), Russia's oldest and one of its last independent human rights organizations, amid a Kremlin campaign to muzzle criticism of the war in Ukraine.
Judge Mikhail Kazakov took less than 20 minutes to render his verdict on January 25, according to Mediazona. The formal reason for the move was that members of the group, which was founded in 1976, had participated in events "outside of their region," Moscow.
"You are committing a great sin. You are destroying the human rights movement, you are destroying it," Valery Borshov, co-chair of the group, told the court during the hearing.
"Dissolving the group is a serious blow to the human rights movement not only in Russia but also the world," he added.
MHG was established by prominent Soviet dissidents, Yury Orlov, Lyudmila Alekseyeva, Andrei Amalrik, Natan Sharansky, Mikhail Bernshtam, Yelena Bonner, Aleksandr Ginzburg, Pyotr Grigorenko, and others, in the Moscow apartment of legendary rights defender and physicist Andrei Sakharov.
In 2012, MHG was one of the first human rights groups to condemn Russia’s controversial law on foreign agents.
During unprecedented anti-government protests in Belarus over the country's presidential election in 2020, which was widely seen as rigged, MHG assisted Belarusian citizens who fled that country and came to Russia to avoid extradition.
Since Russia launched its ongoing unprovoked invasion of Ukraine in February last year, MHG has been providing Ukrainian citizens in Russia with help to avoid possible persecution.
From 1996 until her death in 2018, Lyudmila Alekseyeva led the respected organization.
In 2017, when Alekseyeva marked her 90th birthday, Russian President Vladimir Putin visited her at her apartment to congratulate her. Putin then expressed his "gratitude" to her and the MHG for their "significant contribution to the strengthening of democratic institutions and civil society" in Russia.
The decision comes 13 months after the same court shut down the Memorial Human Rights Center, another veteran human rights group in the Russian capital. That action was also made at the Justice Ministry's request.