Annual Report 2022

The NHC’s Europe and Central Asia Department (ECAD) runs extensive programs with local civil society, monitoring and responding to developments in the human rights situation across a wide region. Beyond Norway and the EU, we cover Ukraine, Russia, Belarus, and Moldova, the five Central Asian republics Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan, and the republics of the South Caucasus - Georgia, Azerbaijan, and Armenia, as well as Turkey.

Thematically, the Norwegian Helsinki Committee has always focused on fundamental freedoms. The Europe and Central Asia Department is devoted to civil and political rights, which are continuously under pressure in this vast region. Other key areas of our work include equal rights, LGBTIQ+ issues, business and human rights, and freedom of religion or belief. We always aim to raise public awareness about the situation for individual political prisoners.

The NHC supports partners financially and facilitates platforms and networks for coordinated action. In addition to monitoring, conducting advocacy, we provide education and legal aid in cooperation with our partner organizations. Through various programs and grant schemes, the NHC supports dozens of civil society groups. Some of them have been negatively affected by increased government repression of independent human rights work.

We strive to explain important developments to the public, both in Norway and internationally. We participate in public debates, provide commentary in the media and publish articles and op-eds. Our partners, in turn, provide free legal aid, support political prisoners, initiate strategic litigation, challenge restrictive measures enacted by their governments, expose high-level corruption and discrimination, and many other activities.

Ukrainian civil society mobilised after Russia’s full-scale invasion in ways that left their European partner organizations in awe of their resilience and sheer dedication to human rights. Already in March, Norwegian Helsinki Committee staff travelled to Ukraine in order to support our partners and provide equipment needed in their work documenting possible war crimes and ongoing human rights violations.

In Belarus, the situation remained extraordinarily difficult. The number of political prisoners increased further in 2022, with many NHC partners and friends facing trial and long prison sentences. Although there are hardly any civil society organizations still working openly inside Belarus, we continue to support political prisoners and to raise awareness about their situation. We also continued to support labour organizations, civil society organizations and free media forced to carry on their work outside the borders of Belarus. We cooperated with Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya, president-elect and opposition leader, and her team. Tsikhanouskaya have visited our office several times, most recently at the same time as the Nobel Peace Prize ceremony in December.

While nothing can compare to the horrors that played out in Ukraine over the past year, the year brought various challenges for human rights organizations based in Russia. Repression continued, even as Memorial was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize alongside colleagues from the human rights movement in Belarus and Ukraine. While Russian forces carried out brutal attacks on civilians and civilian infrastructure in Ukraine, police and security forces arrested scores of anti-war activists inside Russia.

The NHC repeatedly raised the situation for Russia’s political prisoners, such as Alexey Navalny and Vladmir Kara-Murza. We requested that the Norwegian government introduce sanctions against those responsible for the imprisonment of Kara-Murza, together with like-minded states. We advocated for the release of Zarema Yangulbaeva from prison, the mother of a judge abducted by Chechen authorities. We also sought to nuance the picture of Russians accepting President Putin’s false narrative of the war by highlighting important anti-war initiatives.

Throughout the year, the NHC organized or participated in several events in Oslo highlighting the ongoing repression in Russia. We invited Russian human rights defenders and journalists to share their experiences with a Norwegian audience. We organized seminars online and offline, on the restrictive amendments to Russia’s media law, as well as events devoted to accountability for Russian war crimes in Ukraine.

In the South Caucasus, the NHC continued its long-term cooperation with civil society in Georgia, Armenia, and Azerbaijan. The region was still reeling from the wider effects of the second Nagorno-Karabakh war, which broke out in 2020, as well as the influx of Russians escaping military service in their home country. Throughout the year, the NHC advocated to expand the role of civil society, for instance in efforts to obtain a sustainable peace in the Karabakh conflict. In the spirit of the Helsinki movement, the NHC and our partner organizations advocated that peace and security can only be achieved by building democratic and free societies.

Similar challenges arose in Central Asia as Russian “refugees” fleeing possible conscription filled hotels and guest houses in Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan in particular. The NHC has had a permanent Representative Office in Central Asia since 2006, monitoring the human rights situation and administering a popular Small Grants Fund for the five republics. Today, a staff of three is based at our Almaty office, covering developments in the entire Central Asian region.

The situation for our partner organizations remained difficult in many focus countries. 10 years have passed since the so-called “foreign agents” law was adopted in Russia, delegitimizing the work of journalists and civil society groups. Since then, governments in some other countries, such as Hungary and Kyrgyzstan, have started to introduce similar laws.

In the course of the year, the NHC hosted several events and meetings with Norwegian and international decision-makers. In June 2022, we contributed to a meeting on Russia and Belarus initiated by Dunja Mijatović, the Commissioner for Human rights of the Council of Europe. At the 2022 OSCE Parliamentary Assembly Summer Meeting in Birmingham, the NHC arranged a side event on political prisoners in Russia, Belarus and some other OSCE participating states, together with the US, Lithuanian Norwegian delegations.

The NHC supported a range of accountability measures, engaging in campaigns and discussions on how to strengthen the Council of Europe. They play a crucial role in protecting democracy, human rights, and the rule of law in Europe, but the war in Ukraine as well as democratic backsliding and disregard of the rule of law in many Member States undermine its authority. The NHC were among the founding members of a new campaign launched in Strasbourg in January 2022, the Campaign to Uphold Rights in Europe (CURE), which aims to make the Council of Europe better equipped to fulfil its mandate.

In September, the NHC arranged two side events at the OSCE Human Dimension Meeting in Warsaw. One of them was dedicated to patterns of impunity for core international crimes (such as war crimes and crimes against humanity), from the brutality of Russian forces during the Chechen wars of the 1990s to today’s war crimes and possible crimes against humanity in Ukraine. The other was devoted to political prisoners in Tajikistan, a country where the human rights situation has dramatically deteriorated in recent years, following a government crackdown on all political opposition.