Ukrainian civil rights defender receives human rights award for documenting war crimes against children

27-year-old Mariia Sulialina, head of the Ukrainian human rights organisation Almenda, was awarded the Civil Rights Defender Award 2024 in Sweden for recording evidence of war crimes against Ukrainian children. This annual award is given for outstanding work in the field of defenсe of civil and political rights.

Source: Civil Rights Defenders website.

The award recognises outstanding human rights defenders who risk their safety to fight for people's civil and political rights.

The award has been given to human rights defenders from Venezuela, Türkiye and Burma since 2013.

The organisers of the Civil Rights Defender Award announced that this year’s winner is Mariia Sulialina, who has been recording violations of children's rights as part of the Almenda organisation since 2013. To do this, human rights activists collect photo and video evidence and conduct interviews with teachers and parents.

"Children in the occupied territories are often invisible. They cannot speak on their own behalf because it is dangerous and can lead to criminal prosecution, and they are not very protected.

The younger they are, the more influence propaganda has on them. Children are our future, and it is our responsibility to protect them from militarisation and indoctrination and to ensure that the reintegration processes take their needs into account," Sulialina says.

Almenda was founded by a group of human rights defenders in Yalta in 2011. The organisation's goal was to work on education on the culture of democracy, peace, human rights and media literacy among teachers and young people in Crimea.

Because of the Russian invasion in 2014, Almenda left the peninsula, and Mariia Sulialina, 18 years old at the time of the occupation, left her native city, Yalta. Before the full-scale invasion, the organisation mainly helped young people from the occupied peninsula study in Ukraine and integrate into society.

Previously: Human Rights Defenders explained how, during the occupation of the right bank of Kherson Oblast, the Russian military imprisoned, tortured and sexually assaulted members of the Ukrainian LGBTQ+ community. The reasons for torture were precisely the victims’ sexual orientation and gender identity.

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