Date of farewell ceremony to human rights activist Sergey Kovalev announced

“Farewell at the Sakharov Center on Friday, the 13th, from 11 am to 1 pm. Street Zemlyanoy Val, 57, bldg. 7, Moscow”, - writes Interfax referring to the message of the son of human rights activist Ivan Kovalev.

The day before it became known that a human rights activist, one of the authors of the Constitution of the Russian Federation and the Russian Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen of 1991, Sergey Kovalev, died in his sleep at dawn on August 9 at five o'clock in the morning at the age of 91.

Sergey Kovalev was born in Ukraine in the city of Seredina-Buda in the family of a railway employee. In childhood and adolescence, he lived in the working village of Podlipki near Moscow, was a champion in boxing in the Moscow region in the youth category. He graduated from the biology department of Moscow State University and was engaged in biophysics, was the author of more than 60 scientific papers. He stood up for genetics, and in 1966 organized a collection of signatures under an appeal to the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR in defense of Andrei Sinyavsky and Julius Daniel.

Kovalev began active human rights activities in 1968, participated in the publication of the samizdat edition of the Chronicle of Current Events. A year after the start of public work, he became a member of the initiative group for the protection of human rights in the USSR. This group was the first independent human rights NGO in the country.

For the release of samizdat in 1975, he was sentenced to seven years in prison and three years in exile under an article on anti-Soviet agitation and propaganda. After serving his sentence, he settled in Kalinin, and returned to Moscow in 1987.

After his release, Kovalev was elected to the Supreme Council of the RSFSR. Then he was elected to the State Duma of the I, II and III convocations, was the first ombudsman for human rights in Russia in 1994-1995 and the first chairman of the Human Rights Commission under the President in 1993-1996, since 1990 he became co-chairman of the human rights society "Memorial" , which is now recognized in the Russian Federation as a foreign agent.

Since 2006, Kovalev has been a member of the Yabloko party, a member of its “human rights faction” and the federal political committee.