Human rights activists Lyudmila Alexeyeva, Oleg Orlov and Sergei Kovalyov received the European Parliament’s Andrei Sakharov prize on behalf of Memorial, a NED grantee, and “all other human rights defenders in Russia.”
Moscow’s municipal authorities are refusing to renew the leases of two leading Russian human rights and democracy NGOs, a move being interpreted as “official retribution” for their role in recent anti-government protests. The move is a further reflection of the shrinking political space available to dissident voices.
City officials are refusing to extend the leases of the Moscow Helsinki Group and the For Human Rights Movement. The Helsinki Group’s Lyudmila Alexeyeva, the doyen of Russia’s human rights movement, has appealed for President Dmitri Medvedev to intervene.
The municipality insists that it is taking the action for business reasons. But Lev Ponomaryev, head of For Human Rights, dismisses the claim.
“If it were just my organization, then maybe I could believe there’s some commercial intrigue behind it,” Ponomaryev said. “But there are two of us in the same boat. It’s definitely politically motivated.”
As Paul Goble notes:
In a comment posted on the Grani.ru portal, the For Human Rights Movement leader suggested that Moscow officials appear to have “listened to Medvedev’s ‘Russia, Forward!’ appeal and decided that the time had come to push the human rights activists into the street”
Alexeyeva recently joined Oleg Orlov and Sergei Kovalyov in Strasbourg, France, to receive the European Parliament’s Andrei Sakharov prize on behalf of Russian human rights group Memorial, also a NED grantee, and “all other human rights defenders in Russia.”
The European Union legislators made the award three months after Memorial activist Natalya Estemirova was murdered in the North Caucasus.
“Besides satisfaction, I also have other feelings,” Orlov said. “We’re getting a prize today, and Natasha got a bullet. That’s bitter.”
The Helsinki Group, For Human Rights and Memorial are grantees of the National Endowment for Democracy.
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