The year 2022 will be remembered not just as the year that Russia started its full-scale war against Ukraine, but also the year that Ukraine received its first Nobel Peace Prize.
The Center for Civil Liberties, a human rights organisation that promotes democracy and civil society, was awarded the 2022 Nobel Prize for Peace, one of the most prestigious such prizes in the world. Yet even this unequivocally significant event stirred up lively controversy and debate online.
Many Ukrainians were outraged at the Nobel Committee’s decision to award the prize to human rights advocates in Russia, Ukraine and Belarus.
Many believed this evoked the old Soviet myth of ‘brotherly nations’. Some people even demanded that Ukraine decline the Nobel.
Few people in Ukraine regarded the Nobel Committee’s decision as an anti-Putin manoeuvre or a celebration of the resistance against the forces of evil shown by human rights advocates. These are people who have spent years talking about war crimes committed by the Russian army in Chechnya and Ukraine. People who helped to defend those who were arrested during anti-government protests. People who were often marginalised and whose voices were ignored.
That is why Ales Bialiatski, a Belarusian pro-democracy activist, whose country is in effect occupied by Russia, was imprisoned in October 2021. That is also why the Russian human rights organisation Memorial, which has consistently opposed the war in Ukraine for many years, was officially banned in Russia even before the beginning of the full-scale invasion.
“The voices of human rights advocates can finally be heard,” says Oleksandra Matviichuk, who heads the Center for Civil Liberties and has been a human rights lawyer for over 20 years. Her organisation helped people who were arrested during the Revolution of Dignity in 2013-14 and the first prisoners of conscience in Russian-occupied Crimea, including Oleh Sentsov and Oleksandr Kolchenko, and reported on the torture of prisoners by Russian soldiers.
The Center for Civil Liberties has been documenting war crimes committed by the Russian occupation forces for eight years, all the while searching for legal mechanisms to bring the Russians to justice. Yet Oleksandra dreams of a time when the Center’s work will no longer be necessary in Ukraine.
In this interview with Ukrainska Pravda, the Nobel Peace Prize laureate envisions a future tribunal for Russian…
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