Word: helsinki
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Last week the council's Executive Committee conferred at the Hanasaari Conference Center near Helsinki. After closed-door sessions, the jittery officials issued a terse endorsement of the grant. However, TIME learned that there was intense debate over a further statement to be issued this week, and about a bold plan to grant another $85,000 to the Patriotic Front...
Lukyanenko had been a founding member of an unofficial Helsinki Watch Committee, set up to monitor Soviet compliance with the 1975 declaration of human rights signed in Helsinki. Of the eleven original members of Lukyanenko's group, which is based in the Ukraine, only five remain free; their leader, Mykola Rudenko, and three others were sentenced to long terms in labor camps after trials in 1977 and 1978. The singularly harsh sentence meted out to Lukyanenko may have been intended as an object lesson to the U.S.S.R.'s largest and most troublesome minority, its 41 million Ukrainians...
...Soviet constitution-and the establishment of an independent socialist Ukraine. In 1961 Lukyanenko was tried for treason and condemned to death by shooting. His sentence was later commuted to 15 years. After his release, he joined forces with other human rights activists, brought together by the Helsinki Committees' commitment to a variety of causes, including Jewish emigration and religious freedom...
...also failed to break the spirit of the two other dissidents tried last week. Viktoras Pektus, who has served 16 years in prisons and camps for his religious convictions, was arrested after helping to organize a Lithuanian Helsinki Watch Committee last year. He was put on trial in the Lithuanian capital of Vilna on charges of anti-Soviet agitation, homosexuality, corruption of minors and drunkenness. Outraged by the accusations, Pektus lay down in the witness box, closed his eyes and refused to take part in the proceedings. The verdict: ten years' imprisonment and five years of Siberian exile...
Thus in a single week Soviet authorities had managed to dispose of three more notable dissidents. Of 38 founding members of the Helsinki Watch Committees, 17 are now in prison, while seven have emigrated or been exiled. Yet another trial is expected soon. The defendant will be Alexander Podrabinek, 24, who has devoted himself exclusively to one aspect of the human rights movement: the plight of dissenters who have been imprisoned in KGB-run mental institutions where beatings and the injection of painful and dangerous drugs are commonplace...