Feedback Our colleagues at the International Association Memorial have issued a statement in support of Radio Liberty and Voice of America, important sources of information and political analysis for the countries of Eastern Europe and Central Asia.
As human rights defenders, experts of ADC Memorial collaborated a lot with Radio Liberty that gave us an opportunity to publish our own articles/columns on such issues as discrimination against women, migrants, children, Roma, Indigenous peoples, as well as invited us to their broadcasts for comments and expert opinions. In total, about a hundred of our various materials were published, which have received a significantly larger audience than the readers of the ADC Memorial website.
In our eyes, the program “A person has a right” is of particular value, which actually conducts human rights and educational work. As Mariana Torocheshnikova said, this work is not easy:
“It is absolutely unbearable to listen endlessly about how Russian prisons are tortured, about how unfortunate Ukrainian civilians who are not even prisoners of war are tortured in the temporary detention centers, it is absolutely impossible to listen endlessly about domestic violence, about abortion bans, about interference in reproductive health, about how the Russian authorities literally purge people who have, from their point of view, an incorrect sexual orientation, because war has actually been declared in Russia against representatives of the LGBT community.”
It’s hard but necessary to talk about all that – victims of violence and discrimination need it, and everyone else needs it, even those who don’t want to know about it.
Today, we learned from a publication of the director of the Russian Service of Radio Liberty that there will be no new releases of the podcast “A Person has a Right” in the coming weeks due to funding problems created by the American administration in 2025. Other programs that are important for groups who are very vulnerable to discrimination, such as Siberia-Realii and North-Realii, are also under threat.
They highlight the problems of the population of remote regions of the Russian Federation, including Indigenous peoples who are oppressed by the Russian authorities, who suffer from violations of their rights to a traditional way of life, culture and the environment, and who are literally destroyed during the aggressive Russian war against Ukraine. All these people have the right to freedom – literally and figuratively.
ADC Memorial expresses its support to Radio Liberty, thanks for its difficult and important work, and hopes that the programs that are so necessary will be preserved and returned to the media agenda.