The path along the corpses

On February 28, the Court of Appeal of the Supreme Court rejected the complaint of the "International Memorial". The decision to liquidate the organization in the lawsuit of the Prosecutor General’s Office entered into force.

From the speech of the lawyer Maria Aismont in the debate on appeal

Everything is very simple. First, you close the archives, limit access to reliable information, redoing the story, moaning from it painful, as you think, pieces and sweetening complimentary. Then you call “foreign agents” free NGOs and the media, humiliating them with this, complicating their lives and eventually eliminating them.

And then, in the void and silence, on the cleaned information field, in the absence of moral guidelines, a crazy idea appears to start a war that is based on incorrect information, loss of morality, contempt for human lives and will, the terrible idea of ​​the primacy of the interests of the state over human rights. But it was precisely about this for decades that the Memorial said - the value of human lives that cannot be sacrificed for the sake of any state idea.

Today, it is especially clearly felt how we all need a “memorial”. How we all need peace. How we need sanity and humanity.

This only at first glance may seem that the repentance of the state for crimes against its and foreign citizens is weakness, this is not so. Only through it, through insight, pain and tears, through the redemption of guilt and the elaboration of injury, can we once come to the present, and not imaginary magnitude.

Maria Aismont