"We are convinced that the moral principles which once compelled us to resist remain exceptionally important today also. This is first of all the intense love for Ukraine which guided our actions. We see the lack of this love today. It is secondly the love of truth which alone can set us free. This love of truth later brought us together on Maidan. And thirdly, it is the love of God who spoke to us in the prisons and labour camps in different ways – for some in religious language, for others secular – and people responded to that call.

Viktor Yushchenko, speaking on behalf of the Ukrainian people and state, expressed deepest honour and gratitude. “It was you who laid the first foundation stones in creating civic society in Ukraine.."

“As far as my perception of freedom is concerned, it has not changed. I paid too high a price for it to now doubt its value”. Myroslav Marynovych, one of the ten founding members of the Ukrainian Helsinki Group, thirty years on

To the founders and members of the Ukrainian Helsinki Group who saw no choice

Those attending included Levko Lukyanenko, Raisa Rudenko, Ludmila Alexeeva (Moscow Helsinki Group), Vasyl Ovsiyenko, Josef Zisels, Osyp Zinkevych and Volodymyr Yavorsky from the Ukrainian Helsinki Human Rights Union.

On the Ukrainian Helsinki Group, the human rights movement and his experiences in the 1970s

Unfortunately none of the action for making the date have been agreed with the actual organizing committee, and no practical assistance has been offered

Petro Grigorenko was one of the original members of the Moscow Helsinki Group, an active defender of the rights of the repressed Crimean Tatar people and spoke out in support of the demonstrators who went out onto Red Square on 26 August 1968 to protest against the invasion of Czechoslovakia as well as of other dissidents

Decree of the President of Ukraine, Viktor Yushchenko, № 908/2006

On 9 November 2006 it will be thrty years since the founding of the Ukrainian Helsinki Group, The level of awareness of the UHG and the dissident movement in Ukraine is on the whole low, and virtually non-existent in many other countries. We asked those who resisted the totalitarian regime and defended their rights to share their thoughts. .

Events are planned in Kyiv around the 9th of November to mark an event which was of major impact in raising awareness in Ukraine and within the world community of human rights and how they were being violated by the Soviet regime

21 years ago today Vasyl Stus, Ukrainian poet, human rights activist and member of the Ukrainian Helsinki Group, died in an isolation cell in one of the Perm Political Prisoner Camps

Volodymyr Marmus who was sentenced to six years labour camp and 5 years exile after he and his friends in 1973 hoisted the Ukrainian flag in the town of Chortkiv speaks of their act and the reaction of the Soviet regime

Members of the Ukrainian Diaspora joined all those in Ukraine who came to honour and remember defender of human rights, Nadiya Svitlychna. President Viktor Yushchenko flew to Kyiv specially in order to attend the funeral.

You were for me, and doubtless for thousands of people in Ukraine and in the Diaspora – living Ukraine, the embodiment of our principles, our conscience

Remembering NADIYA SVITLYCHNA

Nadiya Svitlychna, who spent four years in a Soviet labour camp, and who in emigration was active in the External Representation of the Ukrainian Helsinki Group and edited the “Bulletin of repression in Ukraine”, has died

Yevhen Hrytsyak, one of the leaders of the 1953 Norilsk Uprising , turns 80 tomorrow. We extend our warmest greetings and best wishes to Yevhen Stepanovych and offer the reader a chance to read a remarkable letter

On Ivan Dziuba’s 75th birthday, this discussion on Radio Svoboda points to the enormous role Ivan Mykhailovych’s pivotal work played in Ukraine, and the relevance to this day of the fundamental issues it addressed