Moscow Helsinki Group

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The Moscow Helsinki Group (also known as the Moscow Helsinki Watch Group) is a pathbreaking and influential human rights monitoring group, originally started in what was then the Soviet Union; it still operates in Russia.

It was founded in 1976 to monitor the Soviet Union's compliance with the recently-signed Helsinki Final Act of 1975, which included clauses calling for the recognition of universal human rights.

Its pioneering efforts inspired the formation of similar groups in other Warsaw Pact countries, as well as support groups in the West. In Czechoslovakia, Charter 77 was founded in January 1977; members of that group would later play key roles in the otherthrow of the communist dictatorship in Czechoslovakia. In Poland, a Helsinki Watch Group was founded in September, 1979.

Eventually, the collection of Helsinki monitoring groups inspired by the Moscow Helsinki Group formed the International Helsinki Federation.

1 Details
2 Leaders
3 See also
4 External links
5 Sources

[edit] Details

Helsinki monitoring efforts began in the then Soviet Union began shortly after the publication of the Helsinki Final Act in Soviet newspapers.

On May 12, 1976, Yuri Orlov announced the formation of the "Public Group to Promote Fulfillment of the Helsinki Accords in the USSR", to monitor Soviet compliance with the Helsinki Final Act. The eleven founders of the group also included Yelena Bonner, Anatoly Shcharansky, Anatoly Marchenko, Lyudmila Alexeyeva, Mikhail Bernshtam, Alexander Ginzburg, Pyotr Grigorenko, Alexander Korchak, Malva Landa, and Vitaly Rubin. Ten other people, including layer Sofia Kalistratova, joined the Group later.

The group's goal was to uphold the responsibility of the Soviet Union's government to implement the commitments on human rights made in the Helsinki documents. They based their group's legal viability on the provision in the Helsinki Final Act, Principle VII, which establishes the rights of individuals to know and act upon their rights and duties.

The Soviet authorities responded with severe repression of the group's members over the next three years; tactics used included arrests and imprisonment, internal exile, confinement to psychiatric hospitals, and forced emigration. By the end of 1981, only Elena Bonner, Sofia Kalistratova and Naum Meiman were free, as a result of the unremitting campaign of persecution. The Moscow Helsinki Group was forced to cease operation, and it announced its own dissolution.

However, in 1989, in the atmosphere of glasnost, it was re-established. A group of nine human rights activists, led by Larisa Bogoraz, the widow of Anatoly Marchenko, formally restarted formally restarted the group on July 28, 1989. Included among the re-founders were Yuri Orlov and Lyudmila Alekseyeva, both part of the original group. Other prominent members are Larisa Bogoraz, Sergey Kovalev, Viatcheslav Bakhmin, Lev Timofeev, Henry Reznick, Lev Ponomarev, Gleb Yakunin, and Aleksei Simonov.