Oleg Orlov has defended and fought for human rights for more than 40 years.
Oleg Orlov showed extraordinary courage in his life and won the Nobel Prize for Peace, together with his colleagues at the Memorial Foundation.
In the context of Russia’s war of conquest in Ukraine he came out several times to protest and was each time imprisoned by the police. In 2023 he is 70 years old and is curently on trial for “discreditation of the army” in Russia. He faces up to 3 years in prison.
See the short film report by Memorial on his life and the current situation he is in.
They wanted fascism. They got it.
On December 1, 2022 Mr. Orlov published his opinion on the political situation in Russia on his facebook page. (First this article was published in French, November 13, 2022 – Le Club de Mediapart). On the basis of this article – among other charges – he was prosecuted by the Russian state and put on trial in 2023.
Why imprisoned dissidents are the freest people in today’s Russia
French-American novelist Jonathan Littell shares his view on the trial of Oleg Orlov and what is happening in Russia.
Last words – Orwells’s 1984 is Russia 2023
Oleg Orlov says his last word on his trial in October 2023
February 2024 – Sentenced to 2.5 years in Prison
The committee that decides the winner of the Nobel peace prize, said on Wednesday that the sentencing of human rights campaigner Oleg Orlov in Russia to a prison term was an attempt to “silence” critics, reports AFP.
The 70-year-old Orlov – a key figure of the Nobel prize-winning Memorial group – was sentenced to two and a half years in jail for denouncing Russia’s invasion of Ukraine on Tuesday.
Orlov was accused of discrediting the Russian army in a column written for the French online publication Mediapart, and fined in October after a first trial. The fine was a relatively lenient punishment and prosecutors called for a new trial.
Jorgen Watne Frydnes, chair of the Norwegian Nobel committee, said in a statement that Russian president Vladimir Putin’s “regime has for many years tried to silence the leadership of Memorial and other important civil society organisations in Russia”.
“They are now using the war on Ukraine as a pretext to finish the job,” Frydnes said in a statement. “It is important that they won’t succeed,” he added.
In 2022, Memorial was awarded the Nobel peace prize together with Ales Bialiatski from Belarus and Ukraine’s Center for Civil Liberties.
The Nobel committee said that Memorial was honoured for “its outstanding efforts in documenting war crimes, human rights abuses, and the abuse of power in the former Soviet Union as well as in post-Soviet Russia.”