Thank you very much, Mr. Chair, members of Parliament, ladies and gentlemen, dear friends.
First of all, I would like to say how grateful I am to be offered this platform to continue my husband's hugely important work on behalf of political prisoners in the Russian Federation on behalf of Russian civil society.
I would also like to say how deeply honoured and humbled I am to have Professor Irwin Cotler, a towering figure in the struggle for human rights around the world, as an ally in my struggle, in my fight, for the release of my husband, Vladimir Kara-Murza. Thank you so very much, Professor.
For almost eight months we have been witnessing a bloody massacre of the Ukrainian people by the Russian army, sent to Ukraine by an increasingly deranged dictator in the Kremlin. It seems the world has finally realized, or has been forced to stop closing its eyes to who Mr. Putin truly is, and is now watching in horror, thinking about what else this madman is capable of.
People like my husband, Vladimir Kara-Murza, have known it for over two decades, and have tried time and again to warn the world about the danger of appeasing a dictator and looking for compromises in dealing with a bully who sees every compromise as his opponent's weakness.
The horrible truth about this war is that it was not unexpected, but came as a result of over two decades of impunity that Vladimir Putin has enjoyed while oppressing his own people and carrying out his other military campaigns. For years he's had the opponents of his regime murdered, both in Russia and on foreign soil, and has broken numerous international laws by leading a war in Chechnya, by invading Georgia, by annexing Crimea and by bombing Syria, all of this with no serious repercussions for himself or the regime that he's built. Emboldened by continuous impunity, Vladimir Putin ended up believing that he could get away with pretty much anything and launched a full-blown war of aggression against our closest neighbour, killing thousands and displacing millions.
The aggression against Ukraine goes hand in hand with a massive-scale repression in Russia.
In his Nobel lecture in December 1975, Andrei Sakharov named 126 prisoners of conscience in the Soviet Union. Today, according to Memorial, Russia's most respected human rights NGO, there are 500 political prisoners in the Russian Federation. According to Memorial itself, this number is pretty conservative, since the NGO uses very strict criteria to determine that someone is a political prisoner, and dozens of cases are still being reviewed.
In her Moscow Mechanism report, released in Vienna on September 22 of this year, OSCE rapporteur Professor Nussberger pointed out, “Even though the time frame for the mission was extremely short, the rapporteur was able to collect much more material than could be included in the report. This is due to the enormous dimension of the human rights problems civil society in Russia is facing.”
According to OVD-Info, an independent media project on human rights and political persecution in Russia, since February 24 of this year, 19,335 people have been arbitrarily detained across the country. Over 4,000 administrative cases and hundreds of criminal cases, including against my husband, have been opened against anti-war protesters.
Since February, protests have never stopped and detention stories are becoming increasingly horrific.
Russian journalist Maria Ponomarenko, who is facing up to 10 years in prison for a Telegram post about the Russian bombing of a theatre in Mariupol, was sent to a psychiatric hospital for a so-called “evaluation”, during which she was tortured and injected with unknown substances. Thus, we are witnessing the revival of punitive psychiatry that was widely used against Soviet dissidents. This case is awfully reminiscent of those of Natalia Gorbanevskaya and Vicktor Fainberg, two of the seven people who went out into the Red Square to protest against the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968 and were then sent to a psychiatric hospital to be treated for insanity. Anyone contradicting the official narrative was then, and is again, being portrayed as either a criminal or an insane person.
Poet and activist Artyom Kamardin was beaten and raped with a dumbbell by police officers during his arrest for reciting anti-war poetry at an anti-mobilization event in Moscow. He was denied hospitalization and is now facing a prison term for, as the official police report said, “inciting hatred...with a threat of violence”.
While he was being raped, his girlfriend Alexandra Popova was being beaten and threatened with group rape in the next room. Police officers were pulling her hair out and putting super glue on her face.
Andrei Pivovarov, Lilia Chanysheva, Yuri Dmitriev, Aleksei Gorinov, Igor Maltsev, Ilya Yashin, Aleksei Navalny, Alexandra Skochilenko, Dmitry Talantov, Victoria Petrova, Darya Ivanova—I could read these names for hours.
One of those charged for spreading, as the government calls it, “fake news” about Putin’s war in Ukraine is my husband, Vladimir Kara-Murza. He refused to be intimidated, despite two assassination attacks on him, perpetrated by a team of FSB operatives in retaliation for his tireless advocacy for the introduction of personal targeted sanctions against criminals and murderers of the Putin regime, the same advocacy for which Boris Nemtsov paid the ultimate price when he was assassinated on the Bolshoy Moskvoretsky Bridge in Moscow in 2015.
Since his arrest in early April, Vladimir has been designated as a foreign agent by the Russian authorities and as a prisoner of conscience by Amnesty International. Just over a week ago he was awarded the Václav Havel Human Rights Prize by the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe, by the Václav Havel Library and the Charta 77 Foundation, and at the same time was charged with high treason by the Russian government. My husband, the father of my three children, is now facing up to 24 years in prison for standing up to the regime of murderers and for believing that our country deserves a better future.
As Elie Wiesel said in his Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech:
What all these victims need above all is to know that they are not alone; that we are not forgetting them, that when their voices are stifled we shall lend them ours, that while their freedom depends on ours, the quality of our freedom depends on theirs.
I am here today because their voices need to be heard and my husband’s voice needs to be heard—the voice of my partner, my best friend and the father of my children, who has risked his life, time and again, to make sure the world knows that a lot of Russians reject this regime and everything it stands for.
I am here today to ask the global democratic community to find ways to acknowledge these brave Russians and to recognize their fight, because these people give us hope that Russia has a future.
Thank you very much.