For having “repeatedly discredited the Russian army”, in particular in a text criticizing the war in Ukraine, Oleg Orlov, 70, has been on trial since Thursday in Moscow. This tireless defender of human rights, co-president of the NGO Memorial, winner of the 2022 Nobel Peace Prize and dissolved by the Kremlin, is not on his first trial. Since the start of the war in Ukraine, he has been fined five times for taking to the streets with signs deemed subversive. This time he faces three years in prison.

While the use of the word “war” to refer to “the special operation in Ukraine” has been prohibited by the Russian Criminal Code since March 2022, Oleg Orlov, a relentless pacifist, has never ceased to denounce it. The sign he held up on May 12, 2022 unequivocally proclaimed: “The USSR of 1945: a country that defeated fascism, the Russia of 2022: a country defeated by fascism”. In November, he notably called Russia a “fascist state” in a text published on Mediapart.

“Everything will be fine,” he said on the eve of his trial, which was called a “travesty of justice” by Council of Europe human rights commissioner Dunja Mijatovi?. “I am a human rights defender, dealing for many years with violations of human rights and humanitarian law standards in the conflict area. It obliges. (…). Someone might say to himself that it is better to be silent. But my whole life and my position have always compelled me and compels me not to be silent,” he added.

Famous in Russia for the fights he has led for 40 years, the activist, awarded the Sakharov Prize in 2009 and that of the Helsinki Group in Moscow in 2012, has been constantly harassed. After speaking out against the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, he made it his mission with Memorial, founded in the late 1990s, to “document the crimes of the Soviet Union to ensure they never happen again.” not”, explains from France Natalia Morozova, lawyer of this NGO, the oldest and best known in Russia. “We immediately understood that if we didn’t want Stalin’s repressions to be repeated, we had to talk about history, but also about the present, and fight for human rights,” she says.

He also exposes himself. In June 1995, present when Chechen separatists took hostages in a hospital in Russia, he was one of the volunteers to become hostages in exchange for the release of the 1,500 people captured. A personal enemy of Chechen President Ramzam Kadyrov, whom he publicly held responsible for the 2009 assassination of Memorial investigator Natalia Estemirova, he was himself abducted and molested by hooded men, before finally being released .

“In these conditions of widespread fear, of paralysis of Russian civil society, it is important to say publicly that we are not paralyzed, and that we are ready to continue working,” he added. “It is obvious that Russian society is abnormal, deeply sick, and has been for a long time. This disease of indifference is probably the most terrible. »

A petition has been launched to express its solidarity.