14th anniversary of Marek Nowicki’s demise

Marek Nowicki, the first and long-sitting President of the Helsinki Foundation for Human Rights, departed fourteen years ago.

He was a physicist by education, a mountaineer by interest and human rights defender by passion. In the 1980s, Marek Nowicki was one of the founders of the Helsinki Committee in Poland. After 1989 he became a key of the Foundation’s architects, and an author of the proposal of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, a document that significantly influenced the content of the current Constitution of the Republic of Poland.

An irreplaceable human rights teacher, Marek had been travelling with his lectures to Russia, Central Asia and the Caucasus until his last days. In these regions in particular, he remains a symbol of the peaceful struggle for dignity and rights of an individual.

Marek, you will be in our memory forever.