Kharkiv human rights group will receive half of Memorial’s Nobel Peace Prize
The Kharkiv human rights group will receive SEK 1.6 million from the Nobel Peace Prize awarded to the Memorial.
This was reported on the organization's official website.
"The Kharkiv Human Rights Group (KhPG), which is the only active member of the International Memorial in Ukraine, has become a laureate of the 2022 Nobel Peace Prize together with other memorial organizations. In addition, the HRG will receive SEK 1,666,666 — half of the prize money awarded to the Memorial. All this amount will be directed to help the civilian population: families whose members died due to russia's invasion," the message reads.
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On October 7, it was announced that this year's Nobel Peace Prize was awarded to the Ukrainian human rights organization Center for Civil Liberties, International Memorial, and Belarusian human rights defender Oles Bilyatskyi.
In the press release, it was indicated that the award was given to the russian Memorial, but later the Norwegian Nobel Committee clarified in a letter that the award was given to the International Memorial, which unites separate legal entities with the name Memorial registered in russia (32 legal entities), Ukraine (four legal entities), Italy, France, Germany, and Belgium, as well as four structural branches in France, the Czech Republic, Ukraine and the Perm region of russia.
The Kharkiv human rights group, which began its work as "Kharkiv Memorial" at the end of the 80s, currently remains the only active branch of the Memorial in Ukraine. Yevhen Zakharov, director of the KhPG, has also been a member of the board of the International Memorial since 1994.
During its thirty-year history, KhPG has helped hundreds of thousands of people, provided free legal aid to tens of thousands of people, and won more than 150 cases at the European Court of Human Rights (the most in Ukraine among non-governmental organizations) without losing a single case. Another 500 submitted applications are awaiting a decision by the European Court.
Among the achievements of the KhPG is a successful campaign to abolish the death penalty in Ukraine, participation in the creation and lobbying of the Criminal Procedure Code, the system of free legal aid, and the law "On access to public information." KhPG often paid for the work of qualified lawyers in high-profile lawsuits, including the defamation suit of Viktor Medvedchuk against Vakhtang Kipiani due to the book "The Case of Vasyl Stus."
It is also noted that together with another Nobel Peace Prize laureate, the Center for Civil Liberties, and the Ukrainian Helsinki Union for Human Rights, the Kharkiv human rights group in March 2022 launched the T4P (Tribunal for putin) initiative, which managed to collect data on tens of thousands of war crimes during russia's invasion of Ukraine.
