Lutfiye Zudiyeva
Lutfiye Zudiyeva is a prominent Crimean Tatar woman human rights defender and member of the human rights organization Crimean Solidarity which monitors politically-motivated trials in Russian-occupied Crimea and supports political prisoners and their families. She also works as a journalist for the Ukrainian media outlet Graty. In September 2022, together with the editor-in-chief of "Graty", she was shortlisted for the “Honor of the Profession” Ukrainian journalism award. In 2019, she cooperated with the film crew of the documentary about the repression of the Crimean Tatars “Tomorrow comes yesterday” (Turkey) and before that with Ukrainian documentary filmmakers. Luftiye Zudiyeva also founded the child development centre Elif in Dzhankoy, Crimea, which organized educational events and activities for local children, and worked there as a teacher for 5 years.
The human rights movement Crimean Solidarity was created on 9 April 2016 by the efforts of relatives of those arrested, lawyers and activists as an informal human rights organization to protect victims of repressions on ethnic, religious and political grounds in Russian-occupied Crimea.
Since the annexation of the Crimean Peninsula, HRDs who defend the rights of Crimean Tatars or ethnic Ukrainians, and those who monitor and document violations of human rights in the peninsula that is currently governed de facto by the Russian Federation, and those who work in Luhansk and Donetsk and have refused Russian citizenship became the main targets of systemic and severe intimidation and harassment. Thus, HRDs, journalists, lawyers, and bloggers in Crimea and eastern Ukraine have been repeatedly harassed by security forces and subjected to abduction, physical attacks, home searches, surveillance, interrogation, unlawful detention, criminal prosecution, accusations of alleged terrorism and propagation of extremism, deprivation of the right to a fair trial, forced psychiatric examinations, and threats to family members. Several HRDs have been denied access to the peninsula.
