Alina Shkoryna, ukrainian student in Sociology, Oleksandra Matviichuk's sponsor
Rector Blondel, ladies and gentlemen, Ms. Matviichuk,
Just as today is the first time the Ukrainian language has been heard at a UCLouvain honorary doctorate ceremony, so it was in December, when our language was heard for the first time at the Stockholm Concert Hall stage ceremony awarding the Nobel Peace Prize to Oleksandra Matviichuk and her organization, the Center for Civil Liberties, for their outstanding human rights work.
Despite your frantic schedule, we are extremely pleased you could be with us today. It has also been a challenge for us, your sponsors, to manage a great deal of uncertainty. Would you be able to come? When would you be able to come? Do you eat meat? However, I have learned a little rule from our work together: the shorter the message, the more likely it is to be answered.
Your work with the Center for Civil Liberties team has created many initiatives aimed at strengthening the national legal system and international democracy, and more than 25,000 war crimes have been documented—all this work touches the heart of human pain, and it has become your fight. It demonstrates a truly inspiring strength of will, character and passion for your work.
When something as horrific as war happens, we become used to talking in terms of numbers. How many deaths? How many people have had to migrate? This is natural, because no one can bear all at once the grief of each and every individual tragedy. Therefore, the true meaning of many news stories gets buried. However, you, Ms. Matviichuk, raise urgent questions through your work, reminding us of the value of each individual story, each individual tragedy that occurred because of the invading country’s violation of basic human rights, including the most valuable—the right to live.
Thanks to the work of people like Oleksandra Matviichuk, Ukraine is winning!
Glory to Ukraine!
Sandy Tubeuf, professor at the Faculté of Public Health, Oleksandra Matviichuk's sponsor
Dear Oleksandra,
Your fights echo many struggles that I would like to lend my voice to tonight.... I am brimming with ideas and it is difficult to decide which to devote the few minutes I have for my talk.
As a lawyer, you advocate for the right of ordinary people to lead a peaceful life in a world with global solidarity and generosity. This struggle resonates with my own research devoted to equality of opportunities. The unfairness that is the lottery of birth is at the roots of social, geographic, economic and health inequalities. These disparities shape one’s life into either an obstacle race or a leisure walk, regardless of one’s talent or effort.
Your activism is a source of enlightenment to those oppressed, to those around the world who are fighting for their rights, opposing a patriarchal society, and tirelessly calling for more justice. I think about our Iranian sisters chanting “Woman, Life, Freedom” uprising against male dominance and an obscurantist and archaic regime. Their fight for democracy comes with blood, torture and rape.
As a Ukrainian, you remind us that we should not take our citizenship and democracy for granted as they are fragile. How many citizens in the world are fighting to live in a democracy or to continue living in a democratic country? I long for their vote to be heard in fair elections; for men and women to be able to challenge unfair governmental decisions without risk of persecution, prison or execution; and I long for free and independent media sources to inform them.
The admirable woman you are, of great humanity, is an inspiration to all those who are committed to addressing sexual and gender-based violence, which, in many contexts is not given the attention it deserves. Your work at the Centre for Civil Liberties calls for humanising victims of violence, calling them by their name, using a language that truthfully reports assault and altogether acknowledges the physical, psychological and emotional consequences.
I admire your commitment, Oleksandra Matviichuk. Your words amass those of the lawyer, the activist, the Ukrainian, and the woman that you are. They testify that in the face of violence, speech is a powerful weapon.
Oleksandra Matviichuk, Ukrainian human rigths lawyer
It is a great honor for me to stand on this stage. I have been protecting human rights for many years. At present, other Ukrainian human rights defenders and I are doing our job in such circumstances, when the law does not work. Russia unleashed the war of aggression in 2014 and extended it to large-scale invasion in 2022. The entire international peace and security system is unable to stop Russian crimes against the civilian population.
Russian troops deliberately shelling on the residential buildings, schools, churches, hospitals, manage filtration camps system, organize forcible deportations, committee abductions, tortures, rapes and murders of civilians.
There is no justification for Russia’s actions. Russia simply uses these crimes as a method of warfare. They attempt to break people’s resistance and occupy the country by means of what I call “the immense pain of civilian people”.
The war has turned people into numbers. I noticed that I myself started to speak more with numbers than with names. The scale of war crimes grows so large that it becomes impossible to recognize all the stories.
But I will tell you one. We found the mass graves in the forest near Izium after liberation of Kharkiv region. The murdered Volodymyr Vakulenko was found in this grave under number 319. He wrote stories for children and entire generations grew up with his "Daddy's book". During the Russian occupation, Volodymyr disappeared. His family hoped to the last that he was alive and, like thousands of other people, was in Russian captivity. It is difficult for them to accept the results of the identification.
We are now recording such stories so that, sooner or later, all Russians who have committed these crimes, as well as Putin and the rest of the senior political leadership and military high command, can be brought to justice. For decades the Russian military has been committing war crimes in Chechnya, Moldova, Georgia, Syria, Mali, Libya. And they have enjoyed impunity. They believed they could do whatever they wanted. We must break this circle of impunity. The world must establish an international tribunal to hold these criminals accountable.
I would not wish anyone to go through this experience. However, all these challenges compel us to reveal our best features and to fight for freedom, to take the burden of responsibility, to be courageous, to make correct choices, to help others, and to find creative solutions. Now, like never before, we are acutely aware of what it means to be human beings.
I know that in different countries worldwide every day many people also fight for freedom and human dignity. Sometimes this fight may seem to be senseless because the enormous power opposes them. However, the total history of humanity convincingly proves that people should not give up. Even, when we have no tools, our own opinion and personal stance always remain. Eventually, it is not so little.
believe that we should support each other in this fight for freedom. Many things have no state borders. Human solidarity is one of the most crucial ones. We live in a very interrelated world. Only spread of freedom is able to make our world safer.