A Ukrainian woman's warning

I had the opportunity to chat for a while with Oleksandra Matviichuk, who was visiting Barcelona at the invitation of CIDOB. This 42-year-old Ukrainian lawyer is the director of the Center for Civil Liberties, which is dedicated to documenting all the war crimes that Putin and the Russian army are committing in Ukraine and to defending the victims of the Russian occupation. Matviichuk was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2022. It's only been three and a half years, but it feels like a decade, especially now that the world's attention is focused on Iran and not Ukraine.

I listened to the 20-minute speech that Matviichuk gave in Oslo when she went up to receive the Nobel Prize. Aside from being thrilled that her language was being spoken for the first time in a room like that, she made a series of points that would be very useful now that we Europeans repeat like fatalistic parrots that the law of the strongest has replaced international law, without then adding what we are prepared to do to definitively prevent it.

In the lawyer's words that day in Norway, there were reasons that Brussels would do well to listen to today: "Human rights must be as important in political decision-making as economic benefits or security [...]. If we don't want to live in a world where the rules are set by countries with the rules of war, authoritarian regimes need a new system that puts human rights at its center."

Matviichuk doesn't engage in theoretical speculation. She experiences every day the murders, rapes, bombings, arson, torture, and deportations that "the strongest" are capable of. She understands the geopolitical reasons, but she thinks about the people. Europe, devastated in 1945, should understand this better than anyone. Among other things, because if not in democracy and human rights, what did we believe in and what do we defend?