The Supreme Court of Russia has received a lawsuit seeking to designate Memorial as an extremist organization. The outlet "Ostorozhno, Novosti" drew attention to the case file entry.
The hearing regarding the Ministry of Justice’s lawsuit is scheduled for April 9. The proceedings will be held behind closed doors.
Memorial emerged in 1989 as a movement dedicated to studying political repression in the USSR. In 2014, its constituent bodies were designated as "foreign agents," and in late 2021, the movement and its legal entities were liquidated by a court ruling.
Since 2020, Memorial’s various entities have collectively been fined several million rubles. The stated grounds for their liquidation included systematic violations of the "foreign agents" law—specifically, as alleged, the failure to include the required "foreign agent" status disclaimers on their published materials.
According to the account presented in the original source material, the organization also faced pressure from authorities and attacks by "patriotic activists," and by 2021, it had been all but dismantled.
Vladimir Putin reportedly cited Memorial’s alleged defense of terrorist organizations as one of the reasons for the persecution against it. The Prosecutor's Office, for its part, asserted that the organization posed a threat to society by using foreign funding to focus exclusively on the crimes of the Soviet regime, while failing to portray the Soviet past in a positive light.