Oleksandra Matviychuk/facebook
Ukrainian human rights defender, head of the organization “Civil Liberties Center”, which was awarded the 2022 Nobel Peace Prize, Oleksandra Matviichuk, handed the Pope Stanislav Aseev's book “The Bright Path: The Story of One Concentration Camp” to the Pope.
Olexandra Matviychuk announced this on the Facebook social network on Tuesday, May 14.
The human rights activist became one of the participants of the second World Meeting on Human Brotherhood, which was organized in the Vatican by the “Fratelli tutti” foundation.
Olexandra emphasized the role of the values of freedom in Ukrainian society and presented the Pope with Stanislav Aseev's book “The Bright Path”: the story of one concentration camp”. The author spent two years in the secret prison “Isolation” in Donetsk, where people were beaten and tortured every day.
Since the beginning of the war in February 2014, we have been constantly documenting such stories. I personally interviewed more than a hundred people who went through the hell of captivity in the occupation. That is why I said in the Vatican that Ukrainians seek peace, but peace is not occupation. Occupation does not reduce human suffering, it simply makes it invisible. We worked on the Declaration of Peace, and maybe one day I will write in my memoirs how, right before the meeting with His Holiness, I had to write by hand in the final version that “occupation is just another form of war,” Oleksandra Matviychuk said.
On the same days, a conference was held in the Vatican, to which Nobel Peace Laureates and representatives of various international organizations were invited to work on a joint document on the Declaration of Peace. Activists from all over the world participated in its creation.
We jointly discussed the Declaration on Peace: the text of this declaration and its emphasis. And it is very important that the final text of the Declaration on Peace included something that is clear to every Ukrainian, but which is not so obvious to the international community. About the fact that occupation is also war, and we all seek peace. We are all fighting for peace, but peace is not an occupation, Oleksandra shared.