FSB officers search homes of Perm human rights advocates, including two Presidential Human Rights Council members

Update: The FSB has opened a felony case against former Perm Memorial chairman Robert Latypov and Historical Memory Center head Alexander Chernyshov for “attempted trafficking of cultural property.” According to the FSB’s Perm branch, the two men “attempted to transport archival documents” that hold “cultural and historical value” from Russia to Germany as part of a prearranged conspiracy.

Russian Federal Security Service (FSB) officers searched the homes of multiple human rights advocates who work for Perm’s Historical Memory Center (the legal successor to the Perm branch of the Nobel Prize-winning human rights group Memorial) on Friday morning.

The targets of the searches included organization border members Tatyana Margolina and Svetlana Makovetskaya (both of whom are members of Russia’s Presidential Human Rights Council) as well as Vera Sedinina, Tatyana Cherepanova, Nadezhda Agisheva, and Oksana Asaulenko.

According to the women’s lawyers, the searches were made in connection with a criminal case regarding the organization’s lack of a document archive. Svetlana Makovetskaya’s husband, human rights advocate Igor Averkiyev, said that the suspects in the case are former Perm Memorial chairman Robert Latypov and current Historical Memory Center head Alexander Chernyshov. Local media reported that the subjects of Friday’s searches are witnesses in the case.