International Courant
A Moscow court docket on Tuesday sentenced a veteran human rights lawyer who spoke out towards the warfare in Ukraine to 2 years and 6 months in jail.
Oleg Orlov, 70, was convicted of “repeatedly discrediting” the Russian army in an article he wrote denouncing the invasion of Ukraine. He dismissed the case towards him as politically motivated, telling the court docket in his closing assertion: “I’ve no regrets and no regret for something.”
Orlov was handcuffed and brought into custody straight from the courtroom. His verdict concluded a brand new trial during which Orlov was beforehand sentenced to pay a superb. Underscoring how little tolerance President Vladimir Putin’s authorities has for criticism of its invasion of Ukraine, the prosecutor had appealed and demanded a harsher sentence.
The prosecutor alleged that Orlov, co-chairman of the Nobel Prize-winning human rights group Memorial, revealed the article motivated by hostility “towards conventional Russian non secular, ethical and patriotic values” and hatred of the Russian army, unbiased Russian information outlet Mediazona stated on Tuesday.
In a press release, Memorial referred to as Orlov’s verdict “an try and drown out the voice of the human rights motion in Russia and all criticism of the state.” It promised to proceed its work.
Tuesday’s verdict drew a crowd of dozens of supporters, together with 18 Western diplomats, Mediazona reported.
“I’m alarmed and anxious about in the present day’s consequence. Oleg Orlov has personally fought for the rights of Russians for greater than 45 years,” US Ambassador to Moscow Lynne Tracy stated in a press release. “In earlier occasions, his efforts had been rewarded on the highest stage. In in the present day’s Russia he’s imprisoned for them.”
A Moscow court docket had fined Orlov 150,000 rubles (about $1,500 on the time) in October 2023, a considerably milder sentence in comparison with the lengthy jail sentences another Russians have acquired for criticizing the warfare.
Each the protection and the prosecution appealed and a better court docket overturned the superb and despatched the case again to the prosecutors. The brand new trial started earlier this month, one other step in a years-long, brutal crackdown on dissent in Russia that the Kremlin stepped up after sending troops to Ukraine in February 2022.
In his closing assertion to the court docket on Monday, Orlov once more denounced the warfare in Ukraine.
Additionally on Tuesday, a court docket in Grozny, the capital of Russia’s largely Muslim Chechen Republic, sentenced a person to three.5 years in jail for publicly burning a Koran in entrance of a mosque. Russian state information company Tass reported that Nikita Zhuravel admitted that he did this on behalf of the Ukrainian particular providers, for a payment.
In September final 12 months, Chechnya’s authoritarian chief Ramzan Kadyrov posted a video of his son showing to beat Zhuravel in detention. Kadyrov praised his son for “defending his faith.”
Tuesday additionally marked the ninth anniversary of the assassination of Boris Nemtsov, a high Russian opposition determine.
Nemtsov, 55, a former deputy prime minister, was shot lifeless as he walked previous the Bolshoy Moskvoretsky Bridge late at evening on February 27, 2015.
He was considered one of Russia’s most energetic and charismatic opposition figures, and his killing was a blow to Putin’s opponents, as was the loss of life of one other opposition chief, Alexei Navalny, in a penal colony on February 16.
An officer within the safety forces of Chechnya’s Kremlin-backed chief was sentenced to twenty years for firing the photographs that killed Nemtsov. 4 different males had been sentenced to 11 to 19 years in jail for his or her involvement.
The Russian court docket sentences the rights group’s co-chairman to 30 months in jail
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