The Committee on Human Rights in the USSR was founded in 1970 by Andrei Sakharov

Andrei Sakharov

Andrei Dmitrievich Sakharov was a Soviet nuclear physicist, dissident and human rights activist. He earned renown as the designer of the Soviet Union's Third Idea, a codename for Soviet development of thermonuclear weapons. Sakharov was an advocate of civil liberties and civil reforms in the...

 together with Andrei Tverdokhlebov and Valery Chalidze

Valery Chalidze

Valery Chalidze is a Georgian-American author, publisher, and the former Soviet dissident and human rights activist.Chalidze was born in Moscow...

 . Andrei Sakharov was an eminent Soviet

Soviet Union

The Soviet Union , officially the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics , was a constitutionally socialist state that existed in Eurasia between 1922 and 1991....

 nuclear physicist

Nuclear physics

Nuclear physics is the field of physics that studies the building blocks and interactions of atomic nuclei. The most commonly known applications of nuclear physics are nuclear power generation and nuclear weapons technology, but the research has provided application in many fields, including those...

 who had publicly opposed the Soviet plans for atmospheric nuclear tests. In 1968, Sakharov had published "Progress, Coexistence and Intellectual Freedom," a plea for nuclear disarmament

Nuclear disarmament

Nuclear disarmament refers to both the act of reducing or eliminating nuclear weapons and to the end state of a nuclear-free world, in which nuclear weapons are completely eliminated....

. As a result his professorship was revoked by Soviet authorities. He became a spokesman for the human rights in the Soviet Union

Human rights in the Soviet Union

Human rights in the Soviet Union have been viewed differently, one view by the communist ideology adopted by the Soviet Union and another by its critics. The Soviet Union was established after a revolution that ended centuries of Tsarist monarchy...

.

The Committee opposed secret trial

Secret trial

A secret trial is a trial that is not open to the public, nor generally reported in the news, especially any in-trial proceedings. Generally no official record of the case or the judge's verdict is made available. Often there is no indictment...

s, capital punishment, and punitive psychiatry.

Other prominent members of the committee included Aleksander Solzhenitsyn, Yelena Bonner

Yelena Bonner

Yelena Bonner was a human rights activist in the former Soviet Union and wife of the noted physicist and dissident Andrei Sakharov. During her decades as a dissident, Bonner was noted for her characteristic blunt honesty and courage.-Youth:...

, Igor Shafarevich, Pavel Litvinov

Pavel Litvinov

Pavel Litvinov is a Russian physicist, writer, human rights activist and former Soviet-era dissident. He is the grandson of Maxim Litvinov, Joseph Stalin's foreign minister during the 1930s, and as such was born and raised amongst the Soviet elite...

 

The Committee formally sought for the membership of International League for Human Rights

International League for Human Rights

The International League for Human Rights is a human rights organization with headquarters in New York City.Claiming to be the oldest human rights organization in the United States, the ILHR defines its mission as "defending human rights advocates who risk their lives to promote the ideals of a...

 and in June 1971 the League adopted the Committee. It was the first time in history a Western Non Governmental Organization had linked itself with one in the Soviet Union.