The Russian authorities on Monday (Might 19, 2025) outlawed Amnesty Worldwide as an “undesirable group,” a label that underneath a 2015 legislation makes involvement with such organizations a legal offense.
The choice by the Russian Prosecutor Common’s workplace, introduced in a web based assertion, is the most recent within the unrelenting crackdown on Kremlin critics, journalists and activists that intensified to unprecedented ranges after Moscow invaded Ukraine in February 2022.
The designation means the worldwide human rights group should cease any work in Russia, and it topics those that cooperate with it or help it to prosecution, together with if anybody shares Amnesty Worldwide’s experiences on social media.
Amnesty Worldwide didn’t instantly touch upon the transfer.
Russia’s checklist of “undesirable organizations” at the moment covers 223 entities, together with distinguished impartial information shops and rights teams. Amongst these are distinguished information organizations like Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty or Russian impartial outlet Meduza, assume tanks like Chatham Home, anti-corruption group Transparency Worldwide, and Open Russia, an opposition group based by Mikhail Khodorkovsky, an exiled tycoon who grew to become an opposition determine.
After Open Russia was declared undesirable in 2021 and disbanded to guard its members, its chief, Andrei Pivovarov, was arrested and convicted on costs of finishing up actions of an undesirable group. He was sentenced to 4 years in jail and launched in 2024 within the largest prisoner alternate with the West since Soviet occasions.
Amnesty Worldwide was launched in 1961. The group paperwork and experiences human rights violations across the globe and campaigns for the discharge of these it deems unjustly imprisoned. It has launched experiences on Russia’s struggle in Ukraine, accusing Moscow of crimes in opposition to humanity, and has spoken out in opposition to the Kremlin’s crackdown on dissent that has swept up hundreds of individuals in recent times.
Amnesty Worldwide’s latest statements on Russia included decrying a jail sentence handed to distinguished election monitoring activists Grigory Melkonyants as a “brazen and politically motivated clampdown on peaceable activism.”
It additionally spoke out in opposition to a sequence of arrests of publishing professionals in Russia final week over alleged “LGBTQ+ propaganda” in books. “This shameless heavy-handed use of state equipment in opposition to literature is as absurd as it’s terrifying,” stated Natalia Zviagina, Amnesty Worldwide’s Russia director.
In its assertion, the Prosecutor Common’s workplace accused the group of operating “Russophobic tasks” and actions geared toward Russia’s “political and financial isolation.”
Printed – Might 19, 2025 06:37 pm IST
