Women are on the front lines of Ukraine’s Center for Civil Liberties, the 2022 Nobel Peace Prize-winning NGO alongside Belarus activist Ales Bialiatski and Russian organization Memorial.
Out of 13 members of its staff, the NGO founded in 2007 and designed during the Ukrainian War has 11 women, according to official information. Among them the leader of the group, the lawyer Oleksandra Matvichuk, and the executive director, Oleksandra Romantsova.
With an agenda focused on promoting human rights in the former Soviet republic, the center has entered the front line of investigations into crimes committed since the beginning of the Russian invasion in February. One of the fronts of action is the mapping of forced disappearances of activists and press professionals.
The NGO makes up, for example, the T4P –Tribunal for Putin, or tribunal for Putin–, a coalition of 21 human rights organizations launched in March to investigate, through reports, social networks and collected images and videos, incidents that could constitute crimes of genocide, war or against humanity.
The alliance’s database shows that at least 21,000 incidents that could be war crimes have been documented since then, most of them in March. The main targets would be residential buildings and the main form of attack, through bombing.
“The center has been committed to identifying and documenting Russian war crimes against the Ukrainian population,” Berit Reiss-Andersen of the Norwegian Nobel committee said in announcing the laureates on Friday.
The award, obviously, was celebrated by the NGO team. But it also served as a window of opportunity to give traction to criticism.
On Facebook, leader Matvichuk asked UN member states to decide to expel Russia from the Security Council, the highest collegiate of the organization, which has Vladimir Putin’s country as a permanent member – and therefore with veto power. .
She also demanded that the United Nations embrace the responsibility of creating an international tribunal to try Putin and also Aleksandr Lukachenko, dictator of Belarus, for war crimes.
“My 20 years fighting for freedom and human rights convincingly show me that ordinary people have much more influence than they think,” the Ukrainian wrote. “Mass mobilization can change world history faster than UN intervention.”
He continued: “If we don’t want to live in a world where the rules are dictated by those with the greatest military potential, and not by the rule of law, the state of things needs to change.”
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