Russian Court Hears Appeal by Veteran Rights Activist

MOSCOW — 

A Russian court began on Thursday hearing the appeal of Oleg Orlov, a veteran human rights campaigner and co-chair of the Nobel Prize-winning group Memorial, who has been convicted of discrediting Russian forces.

Since Russian President Vladimir Putin dispatched Russian forces to Ukraine nearly two years ago, Moscow has jailed or forced into exile the country’s most prominent rights defenders and shuttered leading advocacy groups.

Orlov was found guilty and fined $1,670 in October. His sentence was relatively light, compared to the long jail terms handed to other critics of the conflict.

The 70-year-old denied he was guilty and appealed against the ruling.

But the prosecution, which had requested the initial fine, then asked the court to jail Orlov for three years instead.

Prosecutors, who accused Orlov of harboring “political and ideological hatred” of Russia, had initially requested the fine rather than prison time because of Orlov’s age and health.

They had brought charges against him for organizing one-man protests and writing an opinion piece in French media.

In the article, Orlov said Russian troops were committing “mass murder” in Ukraine and that his country had “slipped back into totalitarianism.”

His argument was informed by the extensive knowledge of Soviet-era repression that he gained as co-chair of Memorial, an NGO that preserved the collective memory of the Soviet Union.

Orlov joined Memorial in the late 1980s when it was being set up to document Soviet-era crimes.

The group went on to become one of the pillars of Russian civil society and received the Nobel Peace Prize in 2022, jointly with a Belarusian human rights advocate and a Ukrainian rights organization.

‘Obliged’ to speak up

Orlov worked on rights abuses in military conflicts, particularly Russia’s two wars in Chechnya in the 1990s.

He was part of a group who in 1995 swapped themselves for hostages taken by Chechen fighters and were eventually released.

He was abducted, beaten and threatened with execution by a group of masked gunmen in Ingushetia, bordering Chechnya, in 2007.

After serving two years in the mid-2000s on Russia’s presidential human rights council, Orlov became an active opponent to Putin.

Having dedicated much of his life to documenting rights abuses, Orlov remained vocal after the Kremlin launched its fully fledged assault on Ukraine in February 2022.

“Some may tell themselves that it is better to be silent. But my entire previous life and my position obliged me not to be,” Orlov told AFP in an interview ahead of his trial.

He has been accompanied to hearings by Dmitry Muratov, founder and editor-in-chief of Novaya Gazeta and himself a winner of the 2021 Nobel Peace Prize.

Muratov had joined his friend’s defense team, which sought to highlight flaws in the Russian judicial system.

The charges against Orlov stem from new legislation the Kremlin has used to prosecute critics of its campaign in Ukraine after an outburst of protests in the early days of the conflict.

Thousands of Russians have been detained, jailed or fined for opposing the conflict.