Oleg Orlov (left), co-chair of the Russian human rights organization Memorial, and her public defender Dmitry Muratov, Russian journalist and 2021 Nobel Peace Prize laureate, attend a hearing in Moscow July 21, 2023. NATALIA KOLESNIKOVA / AFP
With a beaming eye, Oleg Orlov leaves the courtroom satisfied with the mission accomplished. “We managed to destroy all their arguments! » enthuses this historical figure of Memorial, the NGO disbanded by the judicial authorities in 2022. This Friday, July 21, at the third hearing in his trial for “public activities aimed at discrediting” the Russian armed forces, the longtime dissident spent three hours with his lawyers to prove that the work of the experts deployed against him made no sense. “The judge now has all the documents, all the evidence. It’s up to him to decide,” he confides to Le Monde shortly after the hearing on the steps of the small district court where his trial, far from downtown Moscow, has been taking place since June 8. “Will that be enough to change the verdict? Probably not,” admits Oleg Orlov. “Because with us, justice is at your disposal. And the orders…”
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The 70-year-old key figure at Memorial, Russia’s largest human rights organization and co-winner of the 2022 Nobel Peace Prize, is being prosecuted for publicly denouncing the Kremlin’s “special military operation” in Ukraine. From the beginning of the offensive on February 24, 2022, the co-president of the Human Rights Defense Center of the NGO, whose activities are diverse, dared the demonstration. He took to the streets to wave signs in front of the Duma (lower house of parliament), on the cobblestones of Red Square, or anywhere else in central Moscow.
Each time he was arrested by the police within minutes. However, the tireless activist protested alone, as allowed by the strict Russian legislation on the right to demonstrate from the outset. But his shock formulas shattered the speech imposed by the Kremlin: “Peace for Ukraine, Freedom for Russia”, “Our refusal to know the truth and our silence make us accomplices in crime”, “Putin’s madness drives humanity to nuclear war”, “USSR 1945, country victorious over fascism; Russia 2022, land of victorious fascism”.
Read the decryption (in 2021): Article reserved for our subscribers In Russia, the dissolution of the NGO Memorial marks the extent of the democratic decline of the Putin era
refusal to leave the country
After each arrest, Oleg Orlov was prosecuted in the name of new laws hastily passed since the beginning of the conflict in Ukraine, to further undermine freedom of expression. His criminal record is piling up with convictions and fines. “But I will continue. Russia’s war in Ukraine violates not only international law but also our national interests,” he calmly told Spring, who was sitting behind a small wooden table in Memorial’s now-closed offices.
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