The Ministry of Justice filed a lawsuit to liquidate the Moscow Helsinki Group

The Ministry of Justice filed a lawsuit to liquidate the human rights organization Moscow Helsinki Group. Novaya Gazeta reports this with reference to MHG employees.

reports a claim from the department to the Moscow City Court. The Ministry of Justice intends to liquidate the organization based on the results of an audit conducted at the request of the Moscow prosecutor's office.

arrived According to the Ministry of Justice, the Moscow Helsinki Group committed “gross” and “irreparable” violations of the territorial scope of the organization’s activities. MHG executive director Svetlana Astrakhantseva told OVD-Info about this.

19:55 The Moscow prosecutor's office found information on the MHG website about the presence of human rights defenders at events outside the capital, in his Telegram channel, the head of the MHG legal programs, Roman Kiselev. The prosecutor's office considered that, being a regional organization, the MHG does not have the right to participate in any activities in other cities. After this, the Ministry of Justice was sent a request to check the MHG for other violations, and the department discovered 11 more “events” outside Moscow.

writes: “These “events” included observations on the courts, complaints about denial of access to these courts, seminars with regional partners (including online), and even an appeal to the governor of St. Petersburg about lifting restrictions on public events! In addition to this, they scraped up some other shortcomings in the formulas of the charter and dragged in the fact of failure to provide some documents (although we provided everything we could in the 5 days that we were given for this),” Kiselev explained.

The original version of the material indicated that the Prosecutor General's Office required the inspection; this information was incorrect.

The Moscow Helsinki Group is the oldest human rights organization in Russia. The MHG was founded in 1976 by Soviet dissidents. The organization declared its goal to monitor the observance of human rights in the USSR in accordance with the Helsinki Agreements. Among the founders of the MHG is human rights activist Lyudmila Alekseeva. From 1996 until her death in 2018, she headed the organization. In 2017, MHG refused foreign grants so that the organization would not be recognized as a “foreign agent.”