On Friday August 18, the Moscow City Court declared the dissolution of one of the last human rights associations, the Sakharov Center association. This dissolution is a new alarming signal on the decline of freedoms and the repression of opposition voices in the country, since the beginning of the war in Ukraine. The court justified its order on the grounds of the allegedly illegal organization of events outside the “zone of activity” planned and geographically supervised by the government.
This is at least the third time recently that the authorities have used this reason to dissolve an association with critical opinions. In January, for the same reason, the same court dissolved the Moscow Helsinki Group, the oldest human rights NGO in Russia, and then, in April, the Sova Center, which specializes in the study of racism and xenophobia.
In April, the Russian Ministry of Justice launched a “verification” of the Sakharov Center Association, designated since 2014 “foreign agent”, an infamous status. It was this procedure that led to its dissolution.
The director of the Sakharov Center, Sergei Lukachevsky, in exile in Germany, then assured AFP that in the event of dissolution, the NGO would be reconstituted in Russia in the form of a “collective”.
