The war in Ukraine is now going on because the authorities did not listen to the voices of human rights activists, said Oleksandra Matviychuk, head of the Ukrainian Center for Civil Liberties.
“Now the armies are speaking, because before the voice of human rights activists was not heard in our region. We may have been listened to in the UN Human Rights Committee, but certainly not in the halls where decisions are made by people in power, ”she wrote.
According to Matviychuk, “if we don’t want to live in a world where the rules are determined by whoever has a more powerful military potential, and not by the rule of law, this state of affairs should be changed,” there are three solutions:
"one. The UN and participating states must reform international peace and security in order to create guarantees for all countries and their citizens, regardless of their participation or non-participation in military blocs or military power. Russia should be expelled from the UN Security Council for systematic violations of the UN Charter.
2. The UN and participating States must address the problem of “responsibility gaps” and give hundreds of thousands of victims of war crimes a chance at justice. Without this, sustainable peace in our region is impossible. An international tribunal should be created and Putin, Lukashenko and other war criminals should be brought to justice.
3. All my 20 years of experience in the fight for freedom and human rights convincingly says that ordinary people have a much greater impact than they think. The mass mobilization of ordinary people in different countries of the world and their common voice can change world history faster than a UN intervention.”
Matviychuk added that she was happy to share the Nobel Peace Prize with friends and partners from the Russian human rights center Memorial and the Belarusian human rights organization Vesna.
At the same time, representatives of the Ukrainian authorities expressed indignation at the fact that the award, along with the Ukrainian organization, was given to the Russian and Belarusian. “The Nobel Committee has an unambiguously interesting understanding of the word ‘peace’, if the Nobel Peace Prize is jointly received by representatives of two countries that attacked a third,” Mikhail Podolyak, an adviser to the head of the Office of the President of Ukraine, wrote on Twitter.
On October 7, the Nobel Committee announced the winners of the Peace Prize for 2022. The award was shared between Memorial, the Center for Civil Liberties, and the head of the Viasna human rights center, political prisoner Ales Byalyatsky.