Russian court shuts down another human rights group

A prominent human rights group in Russia on Wednesday was ordered to shutter just a day after its sister organization was shuttered by the country’s supreme court.

The Memorial Human Rights Center will be forced to close after it faced charges of justifying terrorism and extremism and was ordered to liquidate in a court hearing, Reuters reported. 

The liquidation of the larger group, International Memorial Society, known as Memorial, was ordered on Tuesday in what appeared to be part of Russia’s effort to eliminate dissent, as prosecutors argued that the group had violated Russia’s policies on foreign agents, according to The Washington Post. 

The groups have denied the allegations. 

The United Nations human rights office in Geneva spoke out against the moves, saying that Russia’s Supreme Court had decided to “dissolve two of Russia’s most respected human rights groups and further weaken the country’s dwindling human rights community,” according to Reuters.

“We urge the Russian authorities to protect and support people and organizations that work to advance human rights across the Russian Federation,” the office added.

Memorial, which has case files for over 60,000 Soviet victims of state repression, was established at the end of the Soviet Union to focus on the gulag, a network of prison camps where political prisoners often died or were executed, the Post added. 

The orders follow a year of the Kremlin jailing and harassing hundreds of opposition figures, activists, journalists and human rights lawyers, according to the Post.