Memorial leaders (clockwise from top) Lyudmila Alexeyeva, Oleg Orlov, and Sergei Kovalev.
Russian human rights group Memorial today received the Sakharov prize, the European Parliament’s tribute to Andrei Sakharov, the Nobel-winning nuclear scientist-turned-human rights campaigner. Jerzy Buzek, the parliament’s president, awarded the prize to Memorial leaders Oleg Orlov, Sergei Kovalev, and Lyudmila Alexeyeva.
Kovalev dedicated the award to those who lost their lives defending human rights in Russia. “This prize is theirs by right,” he said, specifying Natalia Estemirova, a fellow activist in Memorial, lawyer Stanislav Markelov, journalists Anna Politkovskaya and Anastasia Baburova, Nikolai Girenko, Farid Babaev “and many others.”
“It is Europe’s duty not to remain silent” about Russian human rights abuses, he said.
The prize is the European Union’s leading human rights award and comes with a €50,000 ($72,850) honorarium. Previous winners include former South African President Nelson Mandela, East Timorese leader Xanana Gusmao and Cuban dissident Oswaldo Paya.
Memorial is supported by the National Endowment for Democracy.
Yelena Bonner, Sakharov’s widow and a leading human rights defender in her own right, believes Sakharov’s ideals and activities are being neglected in contemporary Russia.
“An idea is an ideal which is then followed by words and then an action,” she told the Svoboda (Liberty) radio station. “So, a line should be drawn under the word ‘words.’ No action – the way Sakharov would do it – has been taken throughout all these years. He is mainly remembered on certain dates.”
But President Dmitry Medvedev distanced himself from his mentor Vladimir Putin by praising Sakharov’s ideas, the Moscow Times reports.
“Analyzing the experience of modern history, we can fully understand the deepness and actuality of Sakharov’s ideas,” Medvedev said in a letter to activists attending a conference dedicated to the former Soviet dissident.
Medvedev has made overtures toward the human rights community, but independent voices still face harassment, prosecution or worse.
Veteran human rights activist Lyudmila Alexeyeva, who heads the Helsinki Moscow Group, also a grantee of the NED, is disappointed that Medvedev has failed to address issues raised at the presidential human rights commission, including violations of the constitutional right to peaceful protest.
Human rights violations in Russia are a “deep concern,” said Thomas Hammarberg, the Council of Europe’s human rights commissioner, addressing the conference. He cited over 3,000 people missing in Chechnya. But Hammarberg pointed to growing activism amongst NGOs and an expanding network of ombudsmen as signs of progress.
Former Soviet dissidents are less sanguine, arguing that human rights activity is more dangerous than under communism.
“If you compare it with the Soviet Union I think Russia today is a far more frightening place for human rights activists,” said former Soviet dissident Lev Ponomaryev, head of Za Prava Cheloveka (For Human Rights).
“Then you could go to prison for a long time but they didn’t kill people. Now they kill human rights activists.”
“We live in the Soviet Union, only a modernized, improved one,” Memorial chairman Sergei Kovalev told the Sakharov conference. “It’s not that it’s completely impossible to work as a human rights defender,” he said. “It’s just that your life is under threat every single day.”
Russians clearly enjoy great freedom, but there were “much fewer” murders of Soviet dissidents, said Lyudmila Alexeyeva.
Human rights and democracy activists have been divided on the question of whether Medvedev was genuinely committed to reform and on his capacity to deliver results when the hard-line siloviki factions around Prime Minister Putin hold the key levers of power.
But some suggest the supposed tensions within the Putin-Medvedev tandemocracy are irrelevant.
“This is a fake debate,” said Heidi Hautala, chair of the European Parliament’s human rights subcommittee. “In any country, no president can have real influence if the political and legal institutions are not functioning. Here we come back to the issue of free and fair elections. That could be the starting point to putting in place functioning institutions.”
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