The cover "Third basket"

The upcoming liquidation of MHG is a sad, but logical result of the attitude to human rights in the Russian Federation

There is no need to talk for a long time about the Moscow Helsinsky group (MHG) - everyone who was somehow or remains associated with the protection of human rights in Russia is known about it. This is the oldest human rights organization, created in 1976, which announced the self-dissolution in 1982 after the landing of its eight members and forced emigration still six, and now another 40 years, which was now liquidated in the claim of the Ministry of Justice, initiated by the prosecutor's office of Moscow.

On August 1, 1975, the heads of 35 states, including the USSR, signed the final act of a conference on security and cooperation in Europe, dedicated to mainly non -power borders, cooperation in the field of economics and strengthen confidence in the military sphere. There was also the so-called third basket, in accordance with the contents of which the subscription countries took obligations to observe human rights and freedoms, including the right to freedom of speech, conscience and movement.

It is clear that the USSR in the field of human rights was ahead of the planet, the third basket did not like the Soviet leaders at all, but the content of the first two for them, already aware of the economic lag from the Western countries, was so important that they decided: let it be, somehow we will be rejected.

But the insidious Soviet dissidents, united by the idea of ​​human rights and freedoms, clung to the third basket and began to appeal to the international community, pointing to political repression and a ban on free departure from the most free country in the world. In particular, the ICG, created at the initiative of the physicist, Yuri Orlov, collected such facts and reported them not only to the West, but also inside the country in the Samizdat "Chronicle of current events", which was reprinted by Lyudmila Mikhailovna Alekseeva (Erica takes four copies, Alexander Galich sang about it).

Lyudmila Alekseeva returned to Moscow from the United States, where she was forced to emigrate and where she wrote a book about the history of dissent in the USSR, in 1993 and headed the MHG revived in 1989, which included former Soviet dissidents and human rights activists of the next generations, and in general the most selective people.

Adventures, including the detention in the image of the Snow Maiden on December 31, 2009, as well as the charge of throwing a radio camp against the British Embassy, ​​a lot of still fell on her, but on the day of the 90th anniversary of Lyudmila Alekseeva on July 20, 2017, Vladimir Putin arrived with a bouquet of flowers in her arbatian apartment-a large, somewhat sentimental photograph of this meeting hung in the office of the chairman The HRC when they were by such Mikhail Fedotov. At all the meetings of the president with the HRC, she received the word and said the most sharp things, and on the day of the funeral of Lyudmila Mikhailovna in December 2018, he came to honor her memory in the house of journalists, where the mourning ceremony was held.

But since then, times have changed, Russia has left the Council of Europe, again saying that it was here that real rights and freedoms were given to the people, and their European are used exclusively as a preposition for violation of the sovereignty of the Russian Federation.

For the time being, for the time being, the memory of Lyudmila Mikhailovna guaranteed the ICG as a well -known immunity, and she was not even declared a “foreign agent”, although in September 2012 Alekseeva signed a statement jointly with other human rights NPOs to fulfill the relevant law, calling it anti -law, and the MHG became part of the violation of the rights and freedoms of “foreign agents”, Lost Russia in the ECHR, alas, only in the summer of this year.

But how much can you repeat that human rights are united throughout the world and above the interests of national states? The shells lay nearby, the term of security letter apparently expired, and the president will once again say that the courts in Russia are independent and no one has the right to intervene in their activities. However, there is no one to ask.

It is pointless to disassemble legal claims to the ICG that arose during an unscheduled verification of its activities by the Office of Justice: today those in whose hands the law, as a club, can eliminate anything and for anything. The main facts that an unscheduled audit suddenly dug up are that the ICG, being a regional organization registered in Moscow, realized its activities, for example, sending its observers to the courts of the Moscow Region (in the case of Alexander Shestun), held conferences in St. Petersburg and Sochi. Lawyers of the ICG will prove that the participation of group members (for example, lawyers Karinna Moskalenko and Henry Reznik) in events organized on the basis of other regional NPOs, is not identical to their organization of the ICG itself, but we understand that the Moscow City Court will come up with how to get around this argument.

The “third basket” is again closed - this time, it seems, along with the first two.