Press Releases
U.S. Hails Moscow Helsinki Group on 30th Anniversary
May 11, 2006
By Louise Fenner
Washington File Staff Writer
Washington -- The State Department applauds the 30th anniversary of the founding of the Moscow Helsinki Group, a nongovernmental organization (NGO) that works to protect human rights in Russia, citing its "three decades of pioneering contributions to the worldwide movement for human rights."
The Moscow Helsinki Group was established on May 12, 1976, "by a small circle of brave human rights activists" aiming to promote the Soviet Union's implementation of the 1975 Helsinki Final Act, a State Department media note said.
At a press conference held in Nobel Laureate Andrei Sakharov's apartment announcing the formation of the Moscow Helsinki Group, the media note continued, "the Group's leader, physicist Yuri Orlov, asked those present to join him in the traditional toast of Soviet dissidents: ‘To the success of our hopeless cause!'"
The Helsinki Final Act, agreed upon at the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe held in Helsinki, Finland, in 1975, called on participating states to respect human rights and fundamental freedoms and established the principle that human rights are a global foreign policy concern. It led to the formation of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE), the world's largest regional human right organization.
The Helsinki pact has provided human rights activists with "an instrument with which to press for human rights and peaceful change," Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said in July 2005 when addressing the OSCE Parliamentary Assembly. (See related article.)
The State Department said that "thanks in great measure to the courage, perseverance and sacrifice of the Moscow Helsinki Group members -- and the work of the citizens' groups that they inspired elsewhere in the Soviet Union and Eastern and Central Europe -- the Helsinki process has not just borne witness to historic changes once thought to be hopeless causes, it has helped to bring those changes about."
By calling attention to current human rights challenges and continuing to work for peaceful, democratic change, the members of the Moscow Helsinki Group "are serving the cause of freedom and strengthening the foundation for lasting security," the media note said.
The Moscow Helsinki Group is a member of the Vienna, Austria-based International Helsinki Federation for Human Rights (IHF), a "community of 45 human rights NGOs in the OSCE region, working together internationally to insist on compliance with human rights standards," according to its Web site.
In January, the IHF and other international human rights groups denounced a "smear campaign" against the Moscow Helsinki Group – an IHF member -- and other NGOs in Russia that faced accusations of involvement in espionage because they had received funding from the government of the United Kingdom.
The IHF said the accusations appeared "to be part of a general assault on civil society and human rights organizations." (See IHF statement in English or Russian.)
The IHF also suggested that the media campaign against the human rights groups was intended "to justify the new law on NGOs, which will drastically diminish the capacity of civil society to monitor and promote human rights." (See related article.)
For more information, see a fact sheet on the OSCE and the 30th anniversary of the Helsinki Final Act.
Information also is available on the Web sites of the International Helsinki Federation for Human Rights and the Moscow Helsinki Group in Russian and English.
For more information on U. S. policies, see Russia.