44th anniversary of the founding of the Moscow Helsinki Group
May 12, 2020 marks the 44th anniversary of the founding of the Moscow Helsinki Group. This year, due to the coronavirus pandemic, we celebrated the birthday of MHG online with our friends and colleagues.
Dear friends, thank you all for participating in our marathon, support, congratulations and kind words!
There were many interesting speeches, movies, music, photographs, memories of the history of the creation of the MHG, a discussion of the human rights situation in Russia and the world, a story about the work of the MHG today, suggestions on possible responses of human rights defenders to modern challenges to human rights and how to preserve and promote human rights values, discussions about the present and future of the Helsinki movement in the world. The event was held in zoom, the live broadcast was on the MHG Facebook page.
It is on the day of the creation of the MHG — May 12 — that we announce the names of the winners of the Moscow Helsinki Group Prize in the field of human rights. This year, members of the MHG decided to present the MHG prize and congratulate its winners later, when the self-isolation regime ends and the holiday can be held offline.
We will definitely tell you more about the participants’ speeches, ideas and suggestions made at the May 12 marathon. Records of all the performances will be slowly spread on our page, so if you missed something, there will be an opportunity to watch it.
At the very beginning, a greeting sounded from the founder of the MHG, Yuri Fedorovich Orlov. We list the main speakers: MHG co-chairs Valery Borschev and Dmitry Makarov, MHG members Boris Altshuler, Olga Zimenkova, Lev Ponomarev, Karinna Moskalenko, Sergey Lukashevsky, Sergey Krivenko, Svetlana Astrakhantseva; one of the founders of the MHG in 1976, the Soviet political prisoner, now known Israeli statesman and politician Nathan Sharansky; Human Rights Watch Russia Program Director Tatyana Lokshina; Leonid Gozman, Russian politician, public figure; Head of the Civil Rights Committee Andrei Babushkin; Bill Bowring, President, European Bar Association for Democracy and Human Rights; Pepin Jerits, Head of the Netherlands Helsinki Committee; Harry Hummel, Senior Consultant, Netherlands Helsinki Committee; Simon Cosgrove, Project Manager, Rights in Russia (UK); Danuta Pshevara, Director of the Helsinki Foundation for Human Rights (Warsaw).
Those who were with us during the live broadcast know that the provocateurs have repeatedly tried to disrupt the meeting and interfere with the speakers. We will be forced to cut out corrupted fragments of some speeches. Previously, they jammed Freedom and the BBC, and now this happens again, the meeting participants joked bitterly.
We are glad that we were able to hold such a large-scale online event. Thanks again to everyone who was nearby, watching and supporting us on this significant day! We hope you were interested)
For your and our freedom!
MHG continues to work, despite the lack of funding. If our activity is important to you — subscribe to monthly payments in any amount that is comfortable for you: https://donate.mhg.ru/
