Russia outlaws Amnesty Worldwide in newest crackdown on dissent and activists

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| Picture Credit score: Reuters

The Russian authorities on Monday (Could 19, 2025) outlawed Amnesty Worldwide as an “undesirable group,” a label that beneath a 2015 legislation makes involvement with such organizations a felony offense.

The choice by the Russian Prosecutor Basic’s workplace, introduced in a web-based assertion, is the newest within the unrelenting crackdown on Kremlin critics, journalists and activists that intensified to unprecedented ranges after Moscow invaded Ukraine in February 2022.

The designation means the worldwide human rights group should cease any work in Russia, and it topics those that cooperate with it or help it to prosecution, together with if anybody shares Amnesty Worldwide’s reviews on social media.

Amnesty Worldwide didn’t instantly touch upon the transfer.

Russia’s record of “undesirable organizations” presently covers 223 entities, together with distinguished impartial information retailers and rights teams. Amongst these are distinguished information organizations like Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty or Russian impartial outlet Meduza, suppose tanks like Chatham Home, anti-corruption group Transparency Worldwide, and Open Russia, an opposition group based by Mikhail Khodorkovsky, an exiled tycoon who grew to become an opposition determine.

After Open Russia was declared undesirable in 2021 and disbanded to guard its members, its chief, Andrei Pivovarov, was arrested and convicted on costs of finishing up actions of an undesirable group. He was sentenced to 4 years in jail and launched in 2024 within the largest prisoner trade with the West since Soviet instances.

Amnesty Worldwide was launched in 1961. The group paperwork and reviews human rights violations across the globe and campaigns for the discharge of these it deems unjustly imprisoned. It has launched reviews on Russia’s battle in Ukraine, accusing Moscow of crimes in opposition to humanity, and has spoken out in opposition to the Kremlin’s crackdown on dissent that has swept up 1000’s of individuals lately.

Amnesty Worldwide’s current statements on Russia included decrying a jail sentence handed to distinguished election monitoring activists Grigory Melkonyants as a “brazen and politically motivated clampdown on peaceable activism.”

It additionally spoke out in opposition to a sequence of arrests of publishing professionals in Russia final week over alleged “LGBTQ+ propaganda” in books. “This shameless heavy-handed use of state equipment in opposition to literature is as absurd as it’s terrifying,” mentioned Natalia Zviagina, Amnesty Worldwide’s Russia director.

In its assertion, the Prosecutor Basic’s workplace accused the group of working “Russophobic initiatives” and actions aimed toward Russia’s “political and financial isolation.”