No to human rights. Memorial and 35 “subdivisions” declared “extremist”, targeting their archival work and support for political prisoners

The listing follows an April 9 ruling by the Supreme Court, which granted a Ministry of Justice request to brand Memorial and its subdivisions “extremist”. The case was heard behind closed doors.

Formally, the court banned the activities of the “International Public Movement ‘Memorial’”, an organisation that does not, as such, exist. Memorial is in reality a community of dozens of scattered groups, many of which have no legal connection to one another, and the catch-all wording was designed precisely so that anyone associated with any of them can be prosecuted. Same logic applies to the sweeping persecution of LGBTQ+ support organisations under the auspices of the 2023 ban against the non-existent “International LGBT social movement”.

The proceedings were extraordinarily opaque: the case was stamped “top secret”, no respondent was named in the court file, none of the Memorial organisations was notified, and staff learned of the lawsuit from the press. It was not even clear until the hearing itself whether defence lawyers would even be admitted: in the LGBT case, none were, on the absurd reasoning that the ban did not affect their rights.

How OVD-Info and Revolt Centre came to be classed as Memorial’s offshoots is unclear. OVD-Info is an independent media project that documents political persecution in Russia and provides legal assistance to people detained at protests and charged in anti-war cases. Revolt Centre is an independent cultural space and educational platform.

Following the designation, Memorial’s online archives have been taken offline, and lawyers have advised supporters in Russia to unsubscribe from the group’s communications and to stop commenting, liking, reposting or donating. These archives included information about the fates of people repressed in the USSR, as well as a 5,000-strong database of present-day political prisoners. Memorial’s “Support for Political Prisoners” project head, Sergei Davidis, has himself been convicted in absentia of “justifying terrorism”.

The “extremist” designation is a sharp escalation in a campaign that has been running for years. In December 2021 the Supreme Court formally shuttered International Memorial, ostensibly for breaches of the “foreign agents” law. In March 2023 investigators opened a “rehabilitation of Nazism” case built on three names (among more than four million) in Memorial’s database of victims of Soviet repression. Two months later the FSB accused the former head of the group’s Perm branch of “smuggling cultural property” for shipping the office’s administrative paperwork from one Russian city to another.

The organisation’s co-chairman, Oleg Orlov, was meanwhile prosecuted for “discrediting the army” over an anti-war article and, in February 2024, sentenced to two and a half years in prison. He was freed that August as part of a prisoner exchange with Western countries.