The Kyiv-based Center for Civil Liberties has run successful campaigns for political prisoners, tracked enforced disappearances and focused on Russian war crimes, but they didn’t see a Nobel Peace Prize coming.
The NGO became the winner of Ukraine’s first-ever Peace Prize on Friday, sharing the award with fellow Belarusian and Russian winners.
The announcement by the Norwegian Nobel Committee caused surprise and joy in the centre.
“When we heard the news, we were amazed,” CCL’s Anna Trushova told AFP.
The group, formed in 2007, is led by right-back Oleksandra Matviychuk, a lawyer who turns 38 on Saturday.
“It is above all a reward for Oleksandra (who) is rallying around her incredible people and doing immense work in the field of human rights,” CCL board member Alissa Malytska told AFP.
Matviychuk, who was on her way to Ukraine from Poland when she heard the news, said in a Facebook message that she was “delighted”.
“We must create an international tribunal and try Putin, Lukashenko and other war criminals,” she added, referring to the autocratic presidents of Russia and Belarus.
CCL gained prominence after 2014 by conducting awareness campaigns around Ukrainian political prisoners and prisoners in Russian-occupied parts of Ukraine – including the Crimea peninsula annexed by Russia in 2014 and the eastern Donbass region – as well as in Russia itself.
CCL’s best-known prisoner campaign was for filmmaker Oleg Sentsov. He directed Rhino, which screened at the 2021 Venice Film Festival.
– prosecution of war crimes –
Senstov was arrested in Crimea after protesting its annexation and spent five years in prison in Russia before being released during a prisoner swap between Ukraine and Russia in 2019.
“It was (Matviychuk’s) idea” to launch an international “SaveSentsov” campaign, Olexander Starodubtsev, deputy head of Ukraine’s national anti-corruption agency, told AFP.
“Lessia is very powerful and confident in what she does,” said Starodubtsev, who studied with Matviychuk at American University of Stanford five years ago.
“Your life is dedicated to your mission. When we were studying in the US, she was busy with human rights projects even at night,” he said.
A slogan posted on her Facebook page seems to back up his words: “Pessimism is a luxury that cannot be afforded.
CCL is also following the enforced disappearances of rights activists, journalists and local council officials.
Since Russia invaded Ukraine in February, the center has also been working to expose and document Russian war crimes against civilians in Ukraine.
With the help of volunteers, the NGO sent groups to suspected crime scenes. It also worked to facilitate the return to Ukraine of “tens of thousands” of compatriots who were forcibly taken to Russia from the war zone.
“We have already registered more than 20,000 crimes,” Trushova told AFP.
The 2022 Peace Prize was also awarded to Belarusian human rights lawyer Ales Bialiatski and the Russian human rights group Memorial.
The Peace Prize winners “represent civil society in their countries,” according to the Nobel Committee.
But the award has not met with widespread acclaim in Ukraine, which was invaded from Russian and Belarusian territory in February.
“Very bad idea (…), but very typical for the West,” commented Olga Roudenko, editor-in-chief of the English news site Kyiv Independent, on Facebook.
“We still have a lot of work to do to ensure that we are perceived as an independent phenomenon and not just as part of the region with Russia and Belarus,” she said.
