Osyp Zinkevych was a Ukrainian migrant, human rights activist, literary critic, founder of the human rights publishing house Smoloskyp and co-founder of several human rights organizations: Smoloskyp Organization for the Defence of Human Rights in Ukraine, Washington Helsinki Guarantees for Ukraine Committee, and the Committee for the Defence of Ukrainian Political Prisoners in the USSR.
As a young migrant student, Osyp Zinkevych set up a Ukrainian youth organization in Paris in 1950, and started a special column for the Ukrainian youth in the émigré newspaper “The Ukrainian Word” (Ukrainske Slovo), the main periodical of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists. From around that time until his death, Zinkevych was the leading figure and the ideologue of Smoloskyp’s metamorphoses: from a column in a newspaper to an independent quarterly (1956), a publishing house in the US (1967), an information service (1967), a human rights organization (1970), and finally an international charitable foundation and a museum-archive in Kyiv (1998). Zinkevych was a member of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN). Until his final breakup with the OUN(M), in 1974, he was a member of its governing body.
Osyp Zinkevych took an active part in the campaigns for human rights in Ukraine, organized a series of protest campaigns against political repression in Soviet Ukraine, and fought for the independent participation of Ukraine in the Olympic games. He cooperated with international human rights organizations (such as Amnesty International) and widely disseminated factual information on political repression and dissident movement in Ukraine.
