Moscow merciless for dissidents

On May 19, the NGO Amnesty International was declared “undesirable” on Russian soil by the public prosecutor’s office of the federation. His crime?

Having relentlessly denounced attacks on freedom of expression. Originally founded by an international mobilization movement demanding the amnesty of innocent prisoners, the organization has much to do in Russia to raise all human rights violations.

In 2021, Amnesty International made public a report on repression Deployed against demonstrators for peace – police violence, arbitrary arrests, abusive detentions, falsified trials … The following year, a new publication identified the similar abuses suffered by journalists who were advisable to give a projector on the demonstrations against the war in Ukraine. In addition, since the start of the conflict, the NGO has been documenting war crimes committed by the Russian army in the occupied territories. It is too much for the Kremlin, which officially accuses the group of foment of “world Russophobic projects funded by the accomplices of the kyiv regime”.

With the eviction of the NGO, the list of prohibited organizations is growing in the country of Vladimir Putin.

Since 2015, a law has made it possible to declare illegal any group perceived as a threat to state security, which then receives the label of “foreigner agent” as in the time of the Cold War.

The vice is tightening on Russian civil society, more and more subtracted with regard to international opinion.

NGO closing deemed “undesirable” is among the many measures contributing gradually but no less decisive to restrict freedoms. At a time when drones continue to rain on Ukraine, a Russian citizen risks prison and ill -treatment if he expresses opinions contrary to the Kremlin Doxa.

The totalitarian shift of the former Soviet country continues to accentuate its vertiginous slope.