Russia’s Supreme Court Tuesday ordered the liquidation of the country’s most prominent human rights organization, the International Memorial Society, in a decision that dismayed rights advocates.

       The ruling signaled the Kremlin’s determination to obliterate dissent, after a year that has seen authorities jail and harass hundreds of opposition figures, activists, journalists and human rights lawyers, forcing dozens of them to flee the country for their safety.

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       Prosecutors accused the International Memorial Society of violating Russia’s law on foreign agents, which is used by authorities to target rights groups, independent journalists and activists. The court accepted the prosecutor’s call to liquidate Memorial for failing to tag all its materials with a foreign agent label.

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       The organization countered that it made strenuous efforts to meet the many requirements of the law. Memorial lawyer Grigory Vaipan said it was the first prosecution in Russia that sought to abolish an organization based solely on breaches to the law on foreign agents.

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       The organization’s human rights wing, Memorial Human Rights Center, faces a similar court hearing Wednesday, when it faces charges of justifying terrorism and extremism, a case that could also see it liquidated.

       President Vladimir Putin has taken a sharp authoritarian turn since engineering constitutional changes in 2020 to allow him to stay in power potentially until 2036. Authorities have targeted critics, declaring them to be foreign agents, undesirable organizations or extremists.

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       State agents poisoned the country’s leading opposition figure Alexei Navalny last year using a banned chemical weapon, according to the U.S. State Department. The authorities jailed him in February, designated his organizations as extremist in June and barred his associates from running for office.

       But the closure of Memorial, which was set up by dissidents — including renowned Nobel peace laureate Andrei Sakharov — during the final years of the Soviet Union, underscored the Kremlin’s disdain for global pressure to improve its record on freedom of speech and rights.

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       The court decision sets an ominous precedent for dozens of other organizations designated as foreign agents by Russian authorities.

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       Vaipan, Memorial’s advocate, said the real violator was not Memorial but the Russian state for its law on foreign agents.

       International Memorial Society Executive director Elena Zhemkova said that the group occasionally made errors but it corrected them.

       “The International Memorial Society is 33 years of hard work by many people. We work and continue to work for the benefit of people,” she told the court.

       The International Memorial Society documents Soviet-era repressions while its sister organization Memorial Human Rights Center focuses on monitoring contemporary human rights abuses, advocating for Russians whose rights have been abused by state agencies.

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