The Prosecutor General’s Office of the Russian Federation has declared the activities of the Ukrainian “Crimean Human Rights Group”, created after the annexation of Crimea and engaged in monitoring and protecting the rights of Crimeans, including Ukrainian and Crimean Tatar activists, undesirable on the territory of Russia.

“It has been established that the activity of the Ukrainian organization poses a threat to the constitutional order and security of the Russian Federation,” the Prosecutor General’s Office said .

Now the Ministry of Justice of the Russian Federation must include the “Crimean Human Rights Group” in the list of foreign and international non-governmental organizations whose activities are recognized as undesirable on the territory of Russia. Collaboration with such organizations threatens with criminal punishment.

Now the list, which the Ministry of Justice has been maintaining since 2015, includes 54 organizations. In 2022, five organizations were declared undesirable, including the Latvian foundation that established the Important Stories media outlet (previously classified as a “foreign agent”).

The group, created after Russia’s annexation of Crimea in 2014, monitors and defends human rights on the peninsula.

The organization recalled that since 2018, the Crimean Human Rights Group has received more than 50 notifications from Roskomnadzor about the inclusion of its articles in the register of information prohibited in Russia, and since 2021 its website has been blocked in Crimea.

“Our website has been informing for many years not only about the war crimes of the Russian Federation in Crimea, but also about constant violations of human rights. We also talked about how Russia hides the real facts about the situation with the pandemic, how it uses the education system to militarize Crimean children and about many other things. This information is also important for the Crimeans themselves. However, Russia is trying to deprive them of access to such information,” Olga Skrypnik, head of the group’s board, said.

Human rights activists, in particular, talk about pressure on political activists and criminal prosecution of supporters of the Islamist organization Hizb ut-Tahrir, which is not banned in Ukraine, but was recognized as a terrorist organization in Russia.

The collected information about the violation of the rights of Crimeans is disseminated by human rights activists among international organizations, including the OSCE, the UN and the Council of Europe. The Group regularly publishes reports on the human rights situation in Crimea.