A court in Moscow has handed down a six-year prison sentence for hooliganism to Azat Miftakhov, a postgraduate mathematics student at the Moscow State University who says he was tortured while in custody.
This post was originally published on Radio Free.
TASHKENT — An Uzbek rights activist and blogger says several people have been jailed after they complained of corruption in the distribution of housing and financial compensation for victims of a deadly dam accident in the eastern region of Sirdaryo last year.
Khairullo Qilichev told RFE/RL that several people in the region had been handed jail terms of between three and seven days after they made the accusations during their efforts to receive compensation following the disaster. According to him, the people were jailed on charges of hooliganism and disobeying the authorities.
The dam of the Sardoba Reservoir in the eastern Uzbek region of Sirdaryo burst early on May 1, 2020, resulting in the death of six people and forcing at least 70,000 people out of their homes. Over 600 homes in neighboring Kazakhstan were also flooded.
Qilichev said many of those who lost their homes had yet to receive the compensation promised by President Shavkat Mirziyoev, while many people related to local officials and whose properties had not been affected by the flooding had been provided with new houses and financial allowances.
Qilichev added that he officially requested from the Sirdaryo regional administration information on the number of local people who lost their houses after the dam burst and how many of them had been jailed in recent weeks. He said he had yet to receive an answer.
A resident of the Sardoba district, 30-year-old Ihtiyor Ochilov, told RFE/RL that he had spent seven days in jail after he officially demanded the authorities provide him and his mother with compensation for damage to their properties.
On January 14, another man, 34-year-old Murodjon Mamaraimov, was handed a seven-day jail term on charges of hooliganism and disobeying the authorities a week after he issued a video statement accusing Sirdaryo authorities of unfairly distributing compensation.
According to official figures, a total of 2,570 private houses and 76 multistory apartment blocks were destroyed by the flooding, while 1,781 private houses and 52 multistory apartment blocks were partially damaged.
A total of 17 people, including energy officials, top officials of the state railways company, and heads of construction companies that were involved into the construction of the dam, are currently on trial in Tashkent over the disaster.
They have been charged with negligence, abuse of office, document forgery, embezzlement, and violating water distribution and safety regulations.
This post was originally published on Radio Free.
Returns can be a big deal in Russia, in art and in life.
In art, there’s unparalleled Soviet-era author Andrei Platonov’s haunting story The Return, and Andrei Zvyaginstev’s 2003 movie with the same title — a nerve-wracking tale of two young brothers on a trip with their “remote, impossible to please, harshly judgmental and violently punishing father,” who has abruptly returned after a long absence: What could go wrong?
Much earlier, there was Ilya Repin’s 1880s painting They Did Not Expect Him, which shows a man striding into a room to the surprise of its occupants — including a boy who seems joyful and adults who look markedly less so — and is said to represent an anti-government revolutionary returning home from exile.
Russian painter Ilya Repin’s They Did Not Expect Him
The real-life returns have been no less dramatic, though their consequences have varied.
There was Lenin, whose return to Russia in 1917 changed the country and the world forever and whose legacy still hobbles his native land nearly a century after his death and 30 years after the Soviet Union fell apart following a failed seven-decade experiment with communism.
And 70 years after the death of Lenin, whose embalmed corpse still remains on display in a mausoleum on Red Square, there was the return of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, who helped expose the Soviet Union’s crimes against its own people and, when he returned not long after its demise, found a Russia where many of the changes were not to his liking.
Solzhenitsyn had little influence after his return — and since his death, in 2008, Kremlin critics say Putin has done more to rehabilitate the reputation of the U.S.S.R. among Russians than to address the darker aspects of its legacy.
‘Victory’ Flight
Now comes Aleksei Navalny, the opposition politician, anti-corruption crusader, and Kremlin critic whose struggle against Putin has defined politics and more in Russia for almost a decade — since he played a leading part in street protests, which began in December 2011, over evidence of fraud in parliamentary elections and dismay at Putin’s plan to return to the Kremlin after four years as prime minister.
That struggle took a major turn last August, when Navalny was poisoned in Siberia with a variant of the Soviet-developed nerve agent Novichok, in what he says was a murder attempt carried out by the Federal Security Service (FSB) and blames on Putin. Navalny was flown to a Berlin hospital for treatment days after the poisoning.
Russian President Vladimir Putin
Convalescing in Germany, Navalny repeatedly vowed to return to Russia — and on January 13, he abruptly announced that he would do so this weekend, on a budget airline flight scheduled to arrive at Moscow’s Vnukovo airport on the evening of January 17. By coincidence or not, the airline is Pobeda, Russian for victory.
A day after Navalny’s announcement on social media, the Moscow branch of the Russian prison bureau — full name: Federal Service for the Execution Of Punishment — said it would “take all measures” to detain Navalny upon “establishing his whereabouts” — presumably once the plane lands and its door is opened, or sometime shortly after that.
What happens in the coming days, months, and years is harder to predict. But the situation — even before it plays out in what is forecast to be around -20 C weather when he arrives after dark — says several things about Russia under Putin, who has been president or prime minister for more than 21 years and, after securing changes in the constitution several weeks before Navalny’s poisoning, could potentially remain in the Kremlin until 2036.
Defined By Rivalries
Putin has dominated Russia for over two decades. In turn, portions of his rule have been defined in large part by struggles with prominent opponents who are prosecuted, persecuted, or both after falling afoul of the Kremlin — or being targeted by Putin and his allies as perceived rivals in the chase for power and popularity.
Former Russian oligarch Mikhail Khodorkovsky (file photo)
From 2003, it was Mikhail Khodorkovsky, who was arrested that August and spent the next decade in jail or prison on large-scale fraud and theft charges he contends were fabricated to sideline him and wrest control of Russia’s largest oil company, Yukos, which soon ended up in the hands Rosneft, the state company headed by close Putin associate Igor Sechin.
Khodorkovsky’s two trials hurt Russia’s image abroad and in December 2013, Putin pardoned the former tycoon, who was released from a prison near the Arctic Circle and was immediately flown out of Russia – a few weeks before Russia hosted the Sochi Olympics, a showcase event for a president who had campaigned hard to secure the Winter Games for Russia. While claiming that Khodorkovsky is welcome to return, the state has taken steps to deter him from doing so, and he has remained abroad.
By the time of Khodorkovsky’s release, Navalny was also a prominent Kremlin foe. After helping lead the wave of protests that started after State Duma elections in December 2011 and hit their height with a demonstration on Moscow’s Bolotnaya Square on May 6, 2012, the eve of Putin’s return to the presidency, he was charged with financial crimes in the so-called Kirovles Case that July and found guilty a year later — the first of two convictions he contends were fabricated to blunt his challenges to Putin.
Trial And Error
The court that convicted Navalny initially sentenced him to five years in prison and ordered him jailed pending a possible appeal — the usual practice in such cases in Russia. But in a move that lawyers described as unprecedented, and that came as thousands of protested rallied in support of Navalny outside the Kremlin, prosecutors said he and his co-defendant should not be kept behind bars until a ruling on appeal.
They were freed the next morning and Navalny, who the day before his conviction had registered as candidate for Moscow mayor in a September 8 election, was able to go ahead with the campaign. He came in second to the Kremlin-backed incumbent, with 27.4 percent of the vote according to the official results — an outcome he dismissed as “fake” but one that may have frightened the authorities, who barred him from challenging Putin for president in 2018.
Infographic: All The Times Aleksei Navalny Has Been In Jail
The five-year sentence was suspended on appeal, meaning that Navalny was not imprisoned. And since then, while he has repeatedly been jailed for a few days or weeks, he has never been sentenced to prison — a fact that many observers believe stems from a fear in Putin’s Kremlin that putting him away would make him into a martyr, potentially increasing his chances of winning over disgruntled Russians.
This Is Now?
That may change soon. The evidence of FSB involvement in Navalny’s poisoning is also evidence of what analysts say is a shift in the state’s approach to opponents, real or perceived, in the direction of tighter restrictions and further oppression.
And while the authorities have avoided sending Navalny to prison so far, he could now face a term of up to 3 1/2 years not long after he returns: The prison bureau has asked a court to change his suspended sentence he received in a second trial on financial-crimes charges he contends were fabricated to keep him out of elections — the so-called Yves Rocher Case – into a prison term. He also faces new fraud accusations, which he denies, that could lead to a third criminal trial.
Other signs of an intensifying clampdown include new legislation targeting so-called “foreign agents,” new restrictions on public demonstrations, and potential prison terms for online defamation.
In November and December, the Kremlin-controlled parliament passed a “fusillade of bills” that “will practically bury civil society” and further undermine the ability of journalists to cover the news in Russia, media-defense lawyer Galina Arapova told RFE/RL this week.
The screw-tightening comes ahead of September elections to the State Duma, the lower house of parliament, in which Navalny hopes to weaken the unpopular but dominant United Russia party with a “smart voting” strategy he employed in regional and local balloting in 2019 and 2020.
The Duma vote comes about two years ahead of the time when Putin, whose approval rating has dropped from 88 percent in October 2014 and 2015 to 68 percent last October and 65 percent in November amid deep concerns among Russian citizens over their economic security, will need to state publicly whether he intends to run for another six-year term in March 2024.
Months after his return in 1994, Solzhenitsyn told the Duma that the “masses of our people are dismayed, stunned and shocked by humiliation and by the shame of their powerlessness,” and that there was “no evidence that the reforms and the government’s policies are being undertaken in the interests of the people.”
Alexander Solzhenitsyn addresses the Duma in 1994.
But the legislature he addressed was substantially more diverse than the current Duma, whose three nominal opposition parties often back Kremlin initiatives or serve as impotent foils to the United Russia majority. And critics of Putin argue that many of his government’s actions — including the constitutional amendment allowing him alone to seek 12 more years as president after serving four terms — have nothing to do with the interests of the people.
Through a series of video reports on investigations revealing alleged corruption among associates of Putin and other members of the ruling elite, from former Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev to state TV hosts, Navalny seems to have sought to show Russians where he suspects the Kremlin’s interests lie. His fate upon returning may provide some hints about the answer to that question as well.
“After all, Navalny’s arrest is not a question of the just or unjust treatment of an opposition figure, it’s a question of what the FSB and Kremlin have a mandate to do to every one of us,” Russian political analyst Tatiana Stanovaya wrote on Telegram on January 15.
This post was originally published on Radio Free.
Poisoned Kremlin foe Aleksei Navalny has announced his return to Russia on January 17. Analysts say he is balancing the very real threat of arrest against the much slimmer prospect of igniting a massive wave of protest against President Vladimir Putin’s government.
This post was originally published on Radio Free.
SAMARA, Russia — The judges at the trial of a civil rights activist from Russia’s Republic of Tatarstan for mocking President Vladimir Putin and two of his close associates in a YouTube video have banned journalists from attending the proceedings, saying they were adhering to restrictions to combat the spread of the coronavirus.
Judges of the Central Military District Court in the city of Samara on January 14 refused to allow RFE/RL correspondent Yekaterina Mayakovskaya to attend the ongoing trial of Karim Yamadayev, citing the virus restrictions.
Yamadayev’s lawyer Vladimir Krasikov told RFE/RL that, as his trial resumed, his client protested that no journalists were present in the courtroom.
When Judge Igor Belkin told the defendant that journalists could not be present due to coronavirus precautions, Yamadayev challenged the judge’s explanation, saying that journalists had been present at all of the trial’s previous sessions.
Yamadayev, who says he is innocent, demanded that his trial be covered by the media. The judge rejected these demands and continued the trial.
“It looked strange to me, because when prosecutors were given the floor at the trial, journalists were allowed inside to cover the proceedings But when the defense team’s turn came to present testimony, journalists were banned from attending the trial,” Yamadayev’s lawyer said, adding that the courtroom where the trial is being held was big enough to preserve social distancing.
Yamadayev, a former police officer in Tatarstan, was arrested in January 2020 and charged with promoting terrorism and insulting authorities for a video he posted in late-2019 on his YouTube channel called Judge Gramm.
The video in question features Yamadayev, dressed as a judge, reading death sentences to two men whose heads are covered with black sacks. A white sign hangs from their necks with the names “Dmitry Peskov” and “Igor Sechin” respectively.
Peskov is Putin’s long-serving press spokesman, while Sechin is the powerful chief of Russian state-owned oil giant Rosneft.
Another man in the show portrays a third defendant who also has his head covered with a black sack and a sign with the name “Vladimir Putin.”
If found guilty, Yamadayev faces up to seven years in prison.
This post was originally published on Radio Free.
SAMARA, Russia — The judges at the trial of a civil rights activist from Russia’s Republic of Tatarstan for mocking President Vladimir Putin and two of his close associates in a YouTube video have banned journalists from attending the proceedings, saying they were adhering to restrictions to combat the spread of the coronavirus.
Judges of the Central Military District Court in the city of Samara on January 14 refused to allow RFE/RL correspondent Yekaterina Mayakovskaya to attend the ongoing trial of Karim Yamadayev, citing the virus restrictions.
Yamadayev’s lawyer Vladimir Krasikov told RFE/RL that, as his trial resumed, his client protested that no journalists were present in the courtroom.
When Judge Igor Belkin told the defendant that journalists could not be present due to coronavirus precautions, Yamadayev challenged the judge’s explanation, saying that journalists had been present at all of the trial’s previous sessions.
Yamadayev, who says he is innocent, demanded that his trial be covered by the media. The judge rejected these demands and continued the trial.
“It looked strange to me, because when prosecutors were given the floor at the trial, journalists were allowed inside to cover the proceedings But when the defense team’s turn came to present testimony, journalists were banned from attending the trial,” Yamadayev’s lawyer said, adding that the courtroom where the trial is being held was big enough to preserve social distancing.
Yamadayev, a former police officer in Tatarstan, was arrested in January 2020 and charged with promoting terrorism and insulting authorities for a video he posted in late-2019 on his YouTube channel called Judge Gramm.
The video in question features Yamadayev, dressed as a judge, reading death sentences to two men whose heads are covered with black sacks. A white sign hangs from their necks with the names “Dmitry Peskov” and “Igor Sechin” respectively.
Peskov is Putin’s long-serving press spokesman, while Sechin is the powerful chief of Russian state-owned oil giant Rosneft.
Another man in the show portrays a third defendant who also has his head covered with a black sack and a sign with the name “Vladimir Putin.”
If found guilty, Yamadayev faces up to seven years in prison.
This post was originally published on Radio Free.
The head of the OSCE’s observer mission for the recent Kyrgyz elections has cited “a number of problems” resulting from Bishkek’s hurried choice to conduct a presidential election and a major referendum on the Central Asian state’s political system simultaneously.
This post was originally published on Radio Free.
The head of an election-monitoring team to Kazakhstan from the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) has detailed a litany of failings and seemingly “concerted” moves by Kazakh authorities to hinder transparency in recent national elections.
In its initial conclusions, the team described the January 10 Kazakh vote as “not competitive” and devoid of “genuine political alternatives to choose from.”
But Jaroslaw Domanski, head of the limited observation mission for the OSCE’s Office for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights (ODIHR), used tougher language in an interview with RFE/RL two days after the balloting.
He cited “bad intention, basically, bad practice, and a lack of goodwill” on Nur-Sultan’s part in conducting the elections.
“While voting itself was generally organized efficiently, and also in line with COVID-19 precautions, many aspects of the process on election day lacked full transparency,” Domanski said.
After the exclusion of many opposition groups that applied to get on the ballot and a boycott by another, the preliminary vote count left the same three parties in parliament as after the previous elections, led by the ruling Nur Otan with over 71 percent.
“The problems actually started after the closing of the polling stations; namely, the counting and tabulation were not assessed positively by our observers,” Domanski said.
It was the Central Asian state of around 18 million people’s first parliamentary elections since the resignation in early 2019 of longtime President Nursultan Nazarbaev, who still holds considerable power despite handpicking a successor, Qasym-Zhomart Toqaev.
The lack of competition dashed the hopes of the country’s Western partners, who had hoped for deep political reforms. Nonetheless, some say continuity will bring the stability needed to attract foreign investment in the resource-rich country — primarily into the oil, gas, and mining sectors.
Domanski said that Kazakh authorities “unfortunately” failed to address “most of the recommendations” from ODIHR observers of the 2016 and 2019 votes.
International election observers have characterized past elections in Kazakhstan as being neither free nor fair, citing electoral fraud, repression of opposition candidates, and restrictions on a free press.
The registered All-National Social Democratic Party (OSDP) boycotted the elections, saying there was no chance for opposition parties like itself.
The ODIHR mission was “limited” this time, but its observers visited more than 90 polling stations in 13 of Kazakhstan’s 17 regions.
There were worrying official moves ahead of this latest vote, like recent legislative changes for NGOs and the last-minute requirement of coronavirus tests, Domanski said, in addition to Kazakhstan’s failure to fulfill “many international commitments for holding democratic elections” to which Nur-Sultan had pledged itself.
“We are talking about the very serious recommendations related to fundamental freedoms, impartiality of election administration, eligibility to stand for elections and to vote for the legislation, media,…and others,” he said.
“Only some of these recommendations were addressed, most of them, unfortunately, only partially.”
Domanski said ODIHR’s observers “confirmed” independent citizens’ complaints of unnecessary obstacles to observing the vote.
ODIHR saw “concerted efforts of the authorities to prevent the effective observation of these elections” that began long before election day.
Domanski also cited tax investigations on NGOs initiated in November, a Central Election Commission resolution granting itself “wide discretion in dismissing the citizen observers,” and the late imposition of COVID-19 testing requirements that were used to exclude journalists and citizen observers.
He blamed the last-minute COVID-19 testing stipulation, in particular, for preventing nearly 90 percent of 2,000 planned observers for two NGOs — MISK and Erkindik Qanaty (Wings of Liberty) — from deploying effectively.
“These concerted measures adopted by the authorities prevented the independent observers from effectively observing the election,” Domanski said.
He said that ODIHR was still looking into whether, in addition to moves that flouted international standards of “good practice,” Kazakh authorities might have contravened their own national legislation.
Kazakh officials have defended their moves as an effort to clarify the situation around NGO operations, he said. “[But] it looks to us [like] bad intention, basically, bad practice and a lack of goodwill,” Domanski said.
He cited Internet service interruptions and website shutdowns throughout election day and criminal and legislative dampers on freedom of expression.
“It stifles genuine political debate. It results in self-censorship of the media, and it makes this entire political space stripped of a genuine debate, political debate, which is a normal and necessary element of any democratic reality and community,” Domanski said.
He said that ODIHR “stand[s] ready to help state authorities to improve to improve, to implement these recommendations,” including through expert legal opinions and “comprehensive dialogue” with Kazakh election officials.
“But the goodwill is needed from Nur-Sultan, from Kazakhstan, in order to start this, to engage in this dialogue in a genuine and serious way.”
He acknowledged that this generally rests “mostly [on] the political will of the national authorities.”
The elections decided 98 of 107 seats in the Mazhilis. Nine other seats will be separately elected by the Assembly of People of Kazakhstan — a political body chaired by Nazarbaev designed to represent ethnic groups in the country.
This post was originally published on Radio Free.
A court in Siberia has extended the pretrial detention of three leaders of an isolated messianic sect who are charged with “creating a religious group, activities of which may impose violence on citizens.”
Defense lawyers for Sergei Torop, the founder of the Church of the Last Testament who calls himself Vissarion, and his associates, Vadim Redkin and Vladimir Vedernikov, wrote on Telegram on January 13 that the Central District Court in the city of Novosibirsk had prolonged their clients’ pretrial detention until April 15.
The lawyers added that they will appeal the court ruling.
The trio was arrested by security forces in September in a massive raid on the group’s remote settlement in the Krasnoyarsk Krai region.
Torop, a 59-year-old former traffic-police officer, founded the Church of the Last Testament in 1991. It was officially registered as a legal religious organization in 1995. The group claims some 10,000 followers, mostly living in southern parts of the Krasnoyarsk region.
The group bars members from eating meat, as well as from using tobacco, alcohol, or money.
Torop also has followers abroad, particularly in Germany.
Seven volumes of the church’s teachings – which combine elements of Russian Orthodoxy and Buddhism with strong elements of collectivism and environmentalism — have been translated into German.
This post was originally published on Radio Free.
A court in Siberia has extended the pretrial detention of three leaders of an isolated messianic sect who are charged with “creating a religious group, activities of which may impose violence on citizens.”
This post was originally published on Radio Free.
Human Rights Watch (HRW) is calling on President-elect Joe Biden to reinforce the commitment of the United States to human rights after four years of shirking it during Donald Trump’s presidency, and to join broad coalitions that have emerged to stand up to “powerful actors” such as Russia and China that have been undermining the global human rights system.
Trump was “a disaster for human rights” both at home and abroad, HRW Executive Director Kenneth Roth wrote in an introduction to the New York-based watchdog’s annual report on human rights published on January 13.
[Trump] cozied up to one friendly autocrat after another at the expense of their abused populations…”
According to Roth, the outgoing president “flouted legal obligations that allow people fearing for their lives to seek refuge, ripped migrant children from their parents, empowered white supremacists, acted to undermine the democratic process, and fomented hatred against racial and religious minorities,” among other things.
Trump also “cozied up to one friendly autocrat after another at the expense of their abused populations, promoted the sale of weapons to governments implicated in war crimes, and attacked or withdrew from key international initiatives to defend human rights, promote international justice, advance public health, and forestall climate change.”
This “destructive” combination eroded the credibility of the U.S. government when it spoke out against abuses in other countries, Roth said, adding: “Condemnations of Venezuela, Cuba, or Iran rang hollow when parallel praise was bestowed on Russia, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, or Israel.”
But as the Trump administration “largely abandoned” the protection of human rights abroad and “powerful actors such as China, Russia, and Egypt sought to undermine the global human rights system,” other governments stepped forward to its defense, he said.
Watchdog is our weekly digest of human rights, media freedom, and democracy developments from RFE/RL’s vast broadcast region. In your in-box every Thursday. Subscribe here.
After Biden’s inauguration on January 20, the U.S. government should “seek to join, not supplant” these collective efforts by a range of Western countries, Latin American democracies, and a growing number of Muslim-majority states.
Biden should also “seek to reframe the U.S. public’s appreciation of human rights so the U.S. commitment becomes entrenched in a way that is not so easily reversed by his successors.”
China
According to HRW’s annual World Report 2021, which summarizes last year’s human rights situation in nearly 100 countries and territories worldwide, the Chinese government’s authoritarianism “was on full display” in 2020.
Repression deepened across the country, with the government imposing a “draconian” national-security law in Hong Kong and arbitrarily detaining Muslims in the northwestern Xinjiang region on the basis of their identity, while others are subjected to “forced labor, mass surveillance, and political indoctrination.”
Russia
In Russia, HRW said the authorities used the coronavirus pandemic as a “pretext…to restrict human rights in many areas, and to introduce new restrictions, especially over privacy rights.”
Following a “controversial” referendum on constitutional changes, a crackdown was launched on dissenting voices, with “new, politically motivated prosecutions and raids on the homes and offices of political and civic activists and organizations.”
Belarus
The situation wasn’t much better in neighboring Belarus, where HRW said thousands were arbitrarily detained and hundreds were subjected to torture and other ill-treatment as strongman Alyaksandr Lukashenka faced an unprecedented wave of protests following a contested presidential election in August.
“In many cases they detained, beat, fined, or deported journalists who covered the protests and stripped them of their accreditation,” HRW said. “They temporarily blocked dozens of websites and, during several days, severely restricted access to the Internet.”
Ukraine
According to the watchdog, the armed conflict in eastern Ukraine “continued to take a high toll on civilians, from threatening their physical safety to limiting access to food, medicines, adequate housing, and schools.”
Travel restrictions imposed by Russia-backed separatists and Ukrainian authorities in response to the coronavirus pandemic exacerbated hardship for civilians and drove them “deeper into poverty.”
Balkans
In the Balkan region, HRW said serious human rights concerns remained in Bosnia-Herzegovina over “ethnic divisions, discrimination, and the rights of minorities and asylum seekers,” while “pressure” on media professionals continued.
There was “limited” improvement in protections of human rights in Serbia, where journalists “faced threats, violence, and intimidation, and those responsible are rarely held to account.”
On Kosovo, HRW cited continued tensions between ethnic Albanians and Serbs and “threats and intimidation” against journalists, while prosecutions of crimes against journalists have been “slow.”
Hungary
Elsewhere in Europe, the government in EU member Hungary continued “its attacks on rule of law and democratic institutions” and “interfered with independent media and academia, launched an assault on members of the lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) community, and undermined women’s rights.”
Iran
HRW said Iranian authorities continued to crack down on dissent, including “through excessive and lethal force against protesters and reported abuse and torture in detention,” while U.S. sanctions “impacted Iranians’ access to essential medicines and harmed their right to health.”
Pakistan
In neighboring Pakistan, the government “harassed and at times prosecuted human rights defenders, lawyers, and journalists for criticizing government officials and policies,” while also cracking down on members and supporters of opposition political parties.
Meanwhile, attacks by Islamist militants targeting law enforcement officials and religious minorities killed dozens of people.
Afghanistan
HRW noted that fighting between Afghan government forces, the Taliban, and other armed groups caused nearly 6,000 civilian casualties in the first nine months of the year.
The Afghan government “failed to prosecute senior officials responsible for sexual assault, torture, and killing civilians,” while “threats to journalists by both the Taliban and government officials continued.”
South Caucasus
In the South Caucasus, six weeks of fighting over the breakaway Nagorno-Karabakh region dominated events in both Azerbaijan and Armenia.
HRW said all parties to the conflict committed violations of international humanitarian law, including by using banned cluster munitions.
Central Asia
In Central Asia, critics of the Kazakh government faced “harassment and prosecution, and free speech was suppressed.”
Kyrgyz authorities “misused” lockdown measures imposed in response to the coronavirus epidemic to “obstruct the work of journalists and lawyers,” and parliament “advanced several problematic draft laws including an overly broad law penalizing manipulation of information.”
Tajik authorities “continued to jail government critics, including opposition activists and journalists, for lengthy prison terms on politically motivated grounds.”
The government also “severely” restricted freedom of expression, association, assembly, and religion, including through heavy censorship of the Internet.
Uzbekistan’s political system remained “largely authoritarian” with thousands of people — mainly peaceful religious believers — being kept behind bars on false charges.
Citing reports of torture and ill-treatment in prisons, HRW said journalists and activists were persecuted, independent rights groups were denied registration, and forced labor was not eliminated.
Turkmenistan experienced “cascading social and economic crises as the government recklessly denied and mismanaged” the COVID-19 epidemic in the country, leading to “severe shortages” of affordable food.
This post was originally published on Radio Free.
MINSK — More than 45,000 people have signed an online petition against holding the 2021 Ice Hockey World Championships in Minsk because of the ongoing violent crackdown on mass protests against elections that kept strongman Alyaksandr Lukashenka in power despite opposition claims the vote was rigged.
Belarus is set to co-host the 2021 world ice hockey championships with Latvia in May and June, but Riga and many other European Union capitals have been calling for the International Ice Hockey Federation (IIHF) to cancel Minsk’s involvement over the brutal crackdown, as well as fears that Lukashenka’s government has failed to control the coronavirus pandemic and is underreporting cases and deaths.
Read our coverage as Belarusians take to the streets to demand the resignation of President Alyaksandr Lukashenka and call for new elections after official results from the August 9 presidential poll gave Lukashenka a landslide victory.
The petition addressed to the IIHF on the Change.org online platform was organized by a noted Belarusian female hockey player, Yulia Abasava.
“… I ask you today not to close your eyes to the fact that the tournament is being planned to be held in the country led by a bloody regime. Do not compromise the IIHF and ice hockey in general in front of the international community,” Abasava’s petition says.
According to Abasava, the issue of holding the tournament in Minsk can be discussed only after the “illegal regime” of Lukashenka is gone.
“If Lukashenka’s bloody regime remains, then many of the illegally arrested people will be convicted and sent to prisons before the tournament starts. No tournament has more importance than human lives,” Abasava wrote in the petition.
The number of signatures under the online petition abruptly rose after IIHF head Rene Fasel met with Lukashenka in the Belarusian capital on January 11 to discuss Minsk’s arrangements to host the 2021 world hockey championships.
At the start of the meeting, the two men warmly embraced and shook hands.
Lukashenka, 66, has faced months of protests demanding he step down following the disputed presidential election in August 2020.
Nearly 30,000 people have been detained, and hundreds reportedly have been tortured in detention and beaten on the streets in the postelection crackdown by the government.
The European Union and the United States refuse to recognize Lukashenka as Belarus’s legitimate leader and have imposed sanctions on him and other senior officials.
This post was originally published on Radio Free.
Outspoken Kremlin critic Aleksei Navalny, who is currently in Germany after surviving a poison attack, has tweeted that he plans to return to Russia on January 17.
Navalny was flown to Berlin for emergency medical care after being poisoned in Russia in August.
Laboratory tests conducted in Germany, France, and Sweden have established that Navalny was poisoned with a toxin from the Russian-made Novichok group of Soviet-era nerve agents, a conclusion confirmed by the International Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons.
Navalny has accused Russian President Vladimir Putin of ordering the poisoning, an allegation rejected by the Kremlin.
This post was originally published on Radio Free.
A Minsk court has found an 89-year-old woman guilty of violating protests laws nearly a month after she was detained alongside dozens of others at a weekly rally of retirees calling on strongman Alyaksandr Lukashenka to step down.
The Leninsky District Court on January 12 slapped Valeria Smirnova with a fine of 870 Belarusian rubles ($337), or more than half the average monthly income in the country, for participating in an unauthorized protest.
Smirnova was one of more than 100 people detained by black-clad security forces in Minsk on December 14 during a regular Monday demonstration of pensioners backing the country’s pro-democracy movement.
Smirnova’s daughter, 67-year-old Lyudmila Bystrenko, was also detained. The women spent more than six hours at the police station before being released.
According to Smirnova’s great-granddaughter, Daria, the soon-to-be nonagenarian was punished for shouting “Long live Belarus!” alongside other retirees.
An anonymous witness–a police officer who spoke in court via video link–confirmed this account, the Belarusian news site Tut.by reported.
Read our coverage as Belarusians take to the streets to demand the resignation of President Alyaksandr Lukashenka and call for new elections after official results from the August 9 presidential poll gave Lukashenka a landslide victory.
Belarus has been roiled by regular protests since early August when Lukashenka was declared victor of a presidential election that opposition leaders said was rigged.
Police have violently cracked down, detaining nearly 30,000 people, according to the UN. There have also been credible reports of torture and ill-treatment, and several people have died.
The United States, the European Union, and several other countries have refused to acknowledge Lukashenka as the winner of the vote, and imposed sanctions on him and his allies, citing election rigging and the police crackdown.
This post was originally published on Radio Free.
Another group of Crimean Tatars has been sentenced to lengthy prison terms on charges of being members of a banned Islamic group and plotting to seize power in the Black Sea peninsula of Crimea that Moscow illegally annexed from Ukraine in 2014.
This post was originally published on Radio Free.
The leader of Russia’s Republic of Tyva in Siberia, Sholban Kara-Ool, has vowed to look into claims by several recruits from Tyva about alleged race-based bullying in a military unit in the western region of Yaroslavl.
In a statement on the VKontakte social network on January 10, Kara-Ool promised to “clarify the situation” and called on soldiers from Tyva to be strong and to try to avoid provocations.
A recruit from Tyva claimed in a video statement that five young soldiers from the republic were discriminated against by their commanders because of their ethnicity and the fact that they have the same surname as Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu.
Tyva are a Turkic-speaking ethnic group of some 308,000 people, mainly residing in the remote republic on the Russian-Mongolian border.
Sergei Shoigu is a Tyva native.
This post was originally published on Radio Free.
MOSCOW — A court in Moscow has postponed handing down its verdict and sentence for Azat Miftakhov, a young mathematician charged with hooliganism who says he was tortured while in custody.
The verdict and sentence were expected to be pronounced on January 11, but the Moscow City Court, in a last-minute decision, said it had moved the hearing to January 18.
Miftakhov, 25, a postgraduate mathematics student at the Moscow State University, has denied the charges, which his lawyers say stem from his anarchist beliefs and support for political prisoners.
Miftakhov’s mother, Gulnur Khusainova, who traveled to Moscow from the Republic of Tatarstan to attend the court session, told RFE/RL that no reason was given for the decision to change the hearing date.
“I want to see my son free,” she said, complaining that it is not easy for her to travel some 800 kilometers (480 miles) from Kazan, Tatarstan’s capital, to the Russian capital.
Miftakhov, 25, a postgraduate mathematics student at the Moscow State University, was arrested on February 1, 2019, and accused of helping make an improvised bomb found in January in the city of Balashikha near Moscow.
Miftakhov was released on February 7, 2019, after the initial charge failed to hold, but he was rearrested immediately and charged with involvement in an arson attack on the ruling United Russia office in Moscow in January 2018.
The Public Monitoring Commission, a human rights group, has said that Miftakhov’s body bore the signs of torture, which the student claimed were the result of investigators unsuccessfully attempting to force him to confess to the bomb-making charge.
A prominent Russian human rights organization, Memorial, has recognized Miftakhov as a political prisoner, while Russian mathematician, Professor Anatoly Vershik, told Novaya gazeta that 2,500 mathematicians from 15 countries had signed a letter urging the International Congress of Mathematicians (ICM) to assist in Miftakhov’s release, warning that many of them may not attend the ICM’s gathering in Russia’s second-largest city, St. Petersburg, scheduled for July 2022.
Others who were detained along with Miftakhov, but later released, have also claimed to have been beaten by police.
On December 23, 2020, the prosecutor in the high-profile trial asked the court to sentence Miftakhov to six years in prison.
This post was originally published on Radio Free.
Exiled Russian opposition leader Aleksei Navalny has accused Twitter of “an unacceptable act of censorship” in a thread arguing against that powerhouse private social network’s permanent ban on outgoing U.S. President Donald Trump after violence in Washington this week.
The 44-year-old Kremlin foe warned in the 11-point thread that “this precedent will be exploited by enemies of freedom of speech around the world.”
Navalny, who is in Germany after being flown there for emergency medical care from a poisoning in Russia in August, said that during his four-year term Trump “has been writing and saying very irresponsible things…[a]nd paid for it by not getting re-elected for a second term.”
Critics say Trump has often used the platform to spread misinformation, hate, and incite violence, including unfounded accusations that the November election was “stolen.”
Public pressure mounted on social platforms to cut off Trump’s access after deadly mob violence by Trump supporters who stormed the U.S. Capitol on January 6 to interrupt Congress’s certification of President-elect Joe Biden’s electoral victory in November.
Trump, who had personally addressed the crowd in the hours before the Capitol attack, had also egged followers on via social media.
Facebook later banned Trump from its Facebook and Instagram platforms through at least the end of his presidency later this month.
Then Twitter on January 8 cited “the risk of further incitement of violence” to impose a “permanent suspension” of his @realDonaldTrump account, which had more than 88 million followers.
The company cited a “close review” of recent Trump tweets and cited its “glorification of violence policy” along with “the context of horrific events this week” and “additional violations” since the Capitol was stormed.
Navalny has used Twitter, YouTube, and other social networks to great effect to skirt the Kremlin’s stranglehold on traditional media during years of anti-corruption campaigns and bids to oppose Vladimir Putin’s leadership and his perceived abuses.
Navalny is thought to have been poisoned in August with a toxin from the Russian-made Novichok group of Soviet-era nerve agents.
Russian authorities have rejected Western medical and intelligence information pointing to official involvement in Navalny’s poisoning, while also resisting opening their own investigation.
Navalny dismissed the argument that Trump was banned for violating Twitter’s rules because “I get death threats here every day for many years, and Twitter doesn’t ban anyone (not that I ask for it).”
He suggested that Twitter “create some sort of a committee that can make…decisions” on such bans, along with a process for appeal.
Many Trump supporters and some pro-Trump celebrities have publicly criticized the ban as politically motivated.
Trump reportedly still has access to the official @WhiteHouse and @POTUS accounts, but will lose this when his presidential term ends on January 20.
Twitter has a “public interest framework” that is aimed at curbing online abuses while it “enables people to be informed and to engage their leaders directly.”
The company suggested in the Trump context that it feared its platform might be used to incite further violence ahead of Biden’s inauguration on January 20.
“Plans for future armed protests have already begun proliferating on and off-Twitter, including a proposed secondary attack on the US Capitol and state capitol buildings on January 17, 2021,” it said.
On January 8, Google suspended Parler from its app store over continued postings that seek “to incite ongoing violence in the U.S.”
Parler, a relatively new platform that says it protects free speech and doesn’t censor, has become increasingly popular among the president’s supporters and conservatives.
This post was originally published on Radio Free.
Just weeks before next month’s snap elections, Kosovo’s interior minister and a leading voice in one of its top parties has been accused of taking a sexist, body-shaming swipe at the Balkan state’s most powerful woman.
Agim Veliu said he didn’t know that Vjosa Osmani, Kosova’s acting president and parliament speaker, was “so big that she needs a space as big as the presidency [of the Democratic League of Kosovo (LDK) and] that [the leadership] should be removed [in order] for her to come [back and join the party].”
Veliu was referring to Osmani’s demand that the LDK’s top leadership resign before she returns to the party in which she served as a deputy chairwoman. She was expelled from the LDK in June after disagreements with its presidency.
In Veliu’s full comments, published on January 5, a journalist follows up by asking what he means by calling Osmani “big.”
“The way I say it,” he responds.
Asked whether he regards that as insulting language, Veliu says, “She considers herself big if she thinks a [LDK] presidency should be removed [from office] for her to come [rejoin it]. She considers herself to be big.”
Asked to further explain, he declines: “No, no, that’s all I’m saying. I don’t want to complicate it further.”
‘Bullying,’ ‘Misogyny’
It’s unclear how perceptions of misogyny or sexism might affect voters in a region where many patriarchal norms and stereotypes against women persist.
“Life in politics is seen as a life dominated by men,” Luljeta Demolli, executive director of the Kosovar Gender Studies Center, told RFE/RL’s Balkan Service. “And it would be better for Agim Veliu to support women entering politics with more democratic language and not such language, because we clearly see that they are afraid of women [and] afraid of women’s votes.”
Osmani has, however, had more important things to think about than Veliu’s seemingly sexist swipe at her.
This week alone, the 38-year-old politician and professor of international law has dissolved the legislature after the Constitutional Court declared the ruling coalition illegitimate, scheduled new national elections, and urged the incoming U.S. administration to review Kosovo’s recent “pledges” to Washington regarding mainly economic issues with Serbia.
But an Osmani adviser, Egnesa Vitia, took to Facebook to demand Veliu’s “immediate dismissal” over the remarks. Vitia said the comments were “unforgivable, intolerable…disgusting” examples of “bullying” and “misogyny.”
Agim Veliu
The National Assembly’s Group of Women caucus told RFE/RL’s Balkan Service that Veliu’s statements were “unacceptable.”
“The use of pejorative vocabulary that insults women is unacceptable and as such should not be used by anyone, much less by politicians,” it said.
While she’s not the first female president since Kosovo declared independence in 2008, Osmani in February became the first woman to serve as speaker of the National Assembly.
Veliu, who is expected to stay in the caretaker government until the February 14 parliamentary elections, is also a deputy chairman of the LDK.
Osmani was also previously the LDK’s candidate for prime minister. She has conditioned a possible return to the LDK on the departure of its top officials, including Veliu.
Osmani also continues to explore the possibility of launching her own political group, tentatively called To Dare.
Scrambling For Votes
The six-week run-up to the elections follows a year of particularly acrimonious politics in the partially recognized Balkan state of some 1.9 million.
Powerful ex-President Hashim Thaci stepped down in November to face war crimes charges at The Hague stemming from Kosovo’s war of independence in the late 1990s and its aftermath, which led to Osmani being made acting president.
And multiple governments have fallen since the LDK and the upstart Self-Determination movement unseated Thaci’s former guerrilla allies in the 2019 elections.
These political uncertainties left a haplessly weak, LDK-led government in charge during landmark U.S. and EU efforts to restart Kosovo’s path to normalization with neighboring Serbia, which still opposes its former province’s independence, declared 12 years ago.
Kosovo’s leading parties — the LDK, Self-Determination, and the former ruling Democratic Party (PDK) — will be scrambling for every vote in February elections seriously constrained by the coronavirus pandemic.
Osmani wrote this week to another pioneering female politician, the longtime speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives, Nancy Pelosi, to congratulate the California Democrat on her reelection for a fourth term chairing the lower house of Congress.
“As a fellow speaker, and crucially both the first women in our respective posts, I cannot stress enough the example we set today for future generations,” Osmani wrote.
‘Sexist Labels’
Osmani is a trained lawyer who led Kosovo’s successful legal defense of its declaration of sovereignty before the International Court of Justice in 2008 and served as President Fatmir Sejdiu’s chief of staff a decade ago.
She teaches international law at the University of Pristina (where Veliu studied law) and has written extensively on gender issues.
In 2019, Osmani wrote a chapter on the origins and effects on society of “stereotypes and sexist labels toward women” for a philological series published by an Albanian cultural and ethnological institute in Pristina.
She cited the prevalence in local language and literature of “hatred, contempt, anger, reproach, irony, ridicule, despair, contempt, resentment, disappointment, disbelief, hostility, envy, jealousy, disgust, and many other attitudes of contempt for women.”
In an abstract of the work, she concludes, “Such negative stereotypes and labels ideologically justify the inferiority of women in society.”
This post was originally published on Radio Free.
The UN Human Rights Office says it regrets the inclusion of five Russian citizens on a controversial list of foreign agents that is seen by the West as a way for Russian authorities to clamp down on dissent.
“The UN Human Rights Office regrets the inclusion of the five individuals in the foreign agents list, which targets human rights defenders and journalists and appears to be aimed at limiting their freedom of expression and speech,” Liz Throssell, a spokeswoman for the UN Human Rights Office, said in a comment to RFE/RL on January 8.
On December 28, Russia said it had placed five people — three journalists who contribute to RFE/RL and two human rights activists — on the Justice Ministry’s registry of “foreign mass media performing the functions of a foreign agent.”
Previously, only foreign-funded nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) and rights groups had been placed on the registry, in keeping with Russia’s passage of its controversial “foreign agents law” in 2012. The law was later expanded to include media outlets and independent journalists.
The three listed individuals affiliated with RFE/RL are Lyudmila Stavitskaya and Sergei Markelov, freelance correspondents for the North Desk (Sever.Realii) of RFE/RL’s Russian Service; and Denis Kamalyagin, editor in chief of the online news site Pskov Province and a contributor to RFE/RL’s Russian Service.
Prominent human rights activist Lev Ponomaryov was also named to the registry, as was activist and Red Cross worker Daria Apakhonchich.
On December 29, the ministry expanded the list again, adding the Nasiliu.net human rights center, which deals with domestic violence cases.
The additions bring the total number of individuals or entities listed to 18, the majority of them affiliated with RFE/RL.
According to Russia’s controversial “foreign agents law,” any individual who distributes materials of a publication or a legal entity recognized as a foreign agent, participates in its creation, and receives foreign funding from abroad can be recognized as a “foreign media agent.”
The Justice Ministry did not explain on what grounds it included the recent additions of the five individuals and one entity to the registry.
Russian officials have previously said that amending the “foreign agents law” to include mass media in 2017 was a “symmetrical response” to the U.S. requirement that Russia’s state-funded channel RT register under the U.S. Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA).
U.S. officials have rejected that claim, arguing that the U.S. and Russian laws differ and that Russia uses its “foreign agent” legislation to silence dissent and discourage the free exchange of ideas.
In 2017, Human Rights Watch, a U.S.-based rights group, called the law “devastating” for local NGOs, saying more than a dozen had been forced to close their doors.
Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty as a whole was listed in the original registry in December 2017, along with several of RFE/RL’s regional news sites: the Crimea Desk of RFE/RL Ukrainian Service; the Siberia Desk of RFE/RL’s Russian Service; RFE/RL’s North Caucasus Service; Idel.Realii of RFE/RL’s Tatar-Bashkir Service; Kavkaz Realii of RFE/RL’s North Caucasus Service; RFE/RL’s Tatar-Bashkir Service; and Factograph, a former special project by RFE/RL’s Russian Service.
Current Time, the Russian-language network led by RFE/RL in cooperation with Voice of America, was also named in the original list, as was Voice of America.
In November 2019, the list was expanded to include Sever.Realii. In February 2020, the Russian Justice Ministry added RFE/RL’s corporate entity in Russia.
RFE/RL has said it is “reprehensible” that professional journalists were among the first individuals singled out by Russia as “foreign agents.”
The Council of Europe also has expressed concerns over situation, saying that the foreign agent law in general — “stifles the development of civil society and freedom of expression.”
This post was originally published on Radio Free.
Former Almaty Mayor Viktor Khrapunov and his wife, Leila Khrapunova, both sentenced to lengthy prison terms in absentia in Kazakhstan on corruption charges that they have rejected as politically motivated, have been granted asylum in Switzerland.
Switzerland’s Federal Administrative Court (FAC) issued a statement on January 7 saying that the decision to provide asylum to “a Kazakh couple who are now divorced” was made because the two “who previously held high-ranking positions in the Kazakh regime, are at risk of being subject to unfair criminal proceedings if they return to the country.”
“This couple therefore has a special profile which would put them at particular risk were they to return to the country. For this reason, the FAC rules that asylum must be granted to these people. These judgments are final and may not be appealed to the Federal Supreme Court.”
Leila Khrapunova confirmed the couple in the FAC statement was her and her husband in a Facebook post on January 7 and that the decision was made on December 29.
Khrapunov was mayor of Almaty from 1997 to 2004. He was later appointed governor of the East Kazakhstan region but was dismissed from that post in 2007 and served for a short time as emergency situations minister.
Khrapunova served as the chairwoman of Kazakhstan’s national television and radio corporation in 1994-95.
Khrapunov and his family moved to Switzerland in 2007 in the wake of a scandal surrounding parcels of land that he was accused of distributed illegally during his tenure as mayor.
In October 2018, a court in Almaty tried the couple in absentia and found them guilty of organizing a criminal group, financial fraud, and bribe-taking.
Khrapunov was also found guilty of abuse of office and of the illegal privatization of property belonging to another person.
The court sentenced Khrapunov to 17 years in prison and his wife to 14 years.
Both have vehemently denied the charges, calling them politically motivated.
This post was originally published on Radio Free.
One year after the downing of a Ukrainian passenger plane in Iranian airspace, Human Rights Watch (HRW) says Iran’s authorities have “harassed and intimidated” the victims’ families instead of conducting a “transparent and credible” investigation into the tragedy.
Ukraine International Airlines Flight 752 crashed shortly after taking off from Tehran’s main airport on January 8, 2020, killing all 176 on board. The majority of the victims were Iranians and Canadians, but Afghans, Britons, Swedes, and Germans were also among the dead.
Iran admitted days later that its forces accidentally shot down the Kyiv-bound plane after firing two missiles amid heightened tensions with the United States.
In a statement coinciding with the first anniversary of the crash, HRW urged Iranian authorities to “commit to a genuinely transparent investigation and cooperate with international bodies to uncover the truth and provide the victims’ families with justice and appropriate redress.”
The government should “promptly pay adequate compensation to the families and carry out a transparent and impartial investigation with appropriate prosecutions regardless of position or rank,” said Michael Page, deputy Middle East director at the New York-based human rights watchdog.
The group said it had interviewed more than a dozen of the victims’ family members, who said that the authorities “had not returned any valuables from their loved ones.”
The authorities also “intimidated and harassed families to stop them from seeking justice outside of the authorities’ own judicial investigations.”
Meanwhile, at least 20 people who participated in peaceful protests over the crash have been prosecuted, according to HRW.
It said two prominent activists among them were sentenced to four years and eight months and five years in prison, respectively, for participating in the demonstrations and posting about it on social media.
Officials from Canada and other countries whose nationals were on board have raised concerns about the lack of transparency and accountability in Iran’s investigation of its own military, and called on the country to cooperate with multilateral investigative initiatives.
In December, an independent report by the Canadian government accused Iran of failing to conduct a proper investigation and said that many questions remain unanswered.
“The party responsible for the situation is investigating itself, largely in secret. That does not inspire confidence or trust,” said a report by Canada’s special counsel on the tragedy.
Iranian officials have said the country never sought to hide the details about the air disaster or to violate the rights of the victims’ families.
There has been no report of senior Iranian officials being dismissed or resigning over the crash.
On January 7, the military prosecutor of Tehran, Gholam Abbas Torki, said experts had concluded their investigations and that “human error” had resulted in the incident.
Judiciary spokesman Gholamhossein Esmaili earlier announced that the trial of several people charged over the crash would begin later this month. He did not identify the suspects.
And Iran announced in December that the government had allocated $150,000 for the families of each of the victims — an offer rejected by the Ukrainian and Canadian governments, as well as some of the families of the victims, who see it as an attempt to close the case and escape accountability.
Canada’s Foreign Minister Francois-Philippe Champagne said in an e-mail sent to AFP on January 7 that Tehran cannot unilaterally decide compensation for the families and that “substantive discussions with Iran” were yet to take place over the matter.
In the week prior to the anniversary of the incident, Iranian authorities organized several events commemorating the victims of the crash, but Page said “public commemorations do not make up for the intimidation of victims’ families and wrongful prosecutions of peaceful protesters.”
The authorities “should immediately and unconditionally drop charges against those peacefully protesting, stop intimidating families, and direct their efforts to holding wrongdoers to account,” he added.
Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, Champagne, and several other members of the government spoke with victims’ families during a private virtual commemoration on the eve of the tragedy’s anniversary.
Trudeau has recently announced that January 8 would become known as Canada’s National Day of Remembrance for Victims of Air Disasters.
Flight 752 was downed the same night that Iran launched a ballistic-missile attack that targeted U.S. soldiers in Iraq. Tehran’s air defenses were on high alert in case of retaliation.
Iran’s missile attack was in response to a U.S. drone strike that killed the powerful commander of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps, Major General Qasem Soleimani, in Baghdad five days earlier.
This post was originally published on Radio Free.
Human Rights Watch (HRW) says Uzbekistan has carried out “some” human rights reforms in recent years, but continues to “severely” hinder the work of independent nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) with “excessive and burdensome” registration requirements.
The government of President Shavkat Mirziyoev should amend the legislation and allow independent groups to register NGOs that seek to work on sensitive issues, including human rights and forced labor, the New York-based human rights watchdog said in a statement on January 7.
HRW said the Uzbek government has taken “some important steps” to ease the registration process since Mirziyoev took over Central Asia’s most populous nation of 32 million in 2016, including reducing the registration fee, cutting the time period for government review of registration documents, and opening a portal that allows submission of applications by independent groups online.
However, “vague and burdensome” rules remain in place despite a commitment made by the president in 2018 to sweep away restrictions on NGOs, according to HRW.
It quoted representatives of six independent groups that have sought registration in Uzbekistan in recent years as saying that their registration applications had been rejected, often “for minor alleged mistakes, including grammar or even minor punctuation mistakes, missing information, or the language used in application documents.”
The legislation includes “excessive requirements for registration and an extensive list of reasons for rejection, making decision-making by authorities appear arbitrary,” according to the representatives.
One of the NGOs was finally allowed to register on its third attempt, HRW said.
Vladislav Lobanov, assistant Europe and Central Asia researcher at HRW, said the Uzbek government needs to respond to international calls for civil society be allowed to act freely.
Last year, the United Nations Human Rights Committee expressed concern that “current legislation continues to impose restrictions on the right to freedom of association” and over “the small number of independent self-initiated NGOs registered [in the country, and] the high number of rejections for registration.”
The European Union and the United States have also expressed concern over registration barriers for NGOs.
This post was originally published on Radio Free.
The Iranian government has passed a bill that criminalizes violence against women, including action or behavior that causes “physical or mental harm” to women.
The bill was passed by the cabinet on January 3, Massoumeh Ebtekar, Iran’s vice president for women’s and family affairs, announced on Twitter, saying the bill was the result of “hundreds of hours of expertise.”
The bill, which has been under review since September 2019, will have to be adopted by parliament to become law.
The New York-based rights group Human Rights Watch (HRW) said in early December that the draft bill falls short of international standards, despite having “a number of positive provisions.”
“While the draft law defines violence against women broadly and criminalizes various forms of violence, it does not criminalize some forms of gender-based violence, such as marital rape and child marriage,” HRW said in a December 2020 report.
“The draft law also does not tackle a number of discriminatory laws including personal-status laws that lawyers said leave women more vulnerable to domestic violence,” the report added.
Media reported that the bill specifies punitive action, including legal punishments, civil redress, and prison sentences for those threatening the physical and mental safety of women.
According to the bill, the judiciary will be tasked with setting up and sponsoring offices that provide support for women who suffer some type of violence or who are susceptible to violence. The bill also requires the establishment of special police units to ensure the safety of women.
An Iran researcher for Human Rights Watch, Tara Sepehrifar, said on Twitter on January 3 that the Iranian parliament “should waste no time in addressing the remaining gaps and pass the draft into law.”
The bill follows several cases of violence against women that have caused public outrage, including last May’s beheading of 14-year-old Romina Ashrafi by her father, in an apparent “honor killing.”
Days after the gruesome killing, Iran passed a law aimed at protecting children from violence.
Iran is one of four countries that have not ratified the United Nations Convention on Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW).
This post was originally published on Radio Free.
Iran has hanged two men for “terrorist acts” and another for murder and armed robbery, the judiciary’s official Mizan news agency said.
The three were executed in the early morning of January 3 in the southeastern Sistan-Baluchistan province, Mizan reported.
Two were identified as Hassan Dehvari and Elias Qalandarzehi, who were arrested in April 2014 after being found with “a large amount of explosives” and weapons, the report said.
The pair were convicted of the abduction, bombing, murder of security forces and civilians, and of working with the Sunni Muslim extremist group Jaish al-Adl (Army of Justice), Iranian media reported.
The U.S.-based Human Rights Activists News Agency (HRANA) said the two had been tortured in detention.
Dehvari and Qalandarzehi were also arrested in possession of documents from Jaish al-Adl on “how to make bombs” as well as “takfiri fatwas”, terms used by Iranian authorities to refer to religious decrees issued by Sunni extremists.
Jaish al-Adl has reportedly carried out several high-profile bombings and abductions in Iran in recent years.
In February 2019, 27 members of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) were killed in a suicide attack in Sistan-Baluchistan claimed by the group.
Sistan-Baluchistan is a volatile area near Iran’s borders with Pakistan and Afghanistan where militant groups and drug smugglers frequently operate.
The third man executed was named as Omid Mahmudzehi. He was convicted of armed robbery and the murder of civilians, Mizan said.
Iran is one of the world’s leading executioners. Amnesty International said in April that at least 251 people were executed by Iranian authorities in 2019.
Iran is also among a handful of countries that execute juvenile offenders.
This post was originally published on Radio Free.
Montenegrin President Milo Dukanovic has refused to approve amendments to a controversial law on religion that has been sharply criticized by ethnic Serbs and the Serbian Orthodox Church.
Dukanovic sent the amendments back to parliament along with six other laws passed by the ruling coalition, his office said on January 2.
A total of 41 deputies of the ruling coalition, which is composed of pro-Serb parties and is closely aligned with the Serbian Orthodox Church, in the 81-seat legislature backed amendments to the Law on Freedom of Religion in a vote on December 29 that was boycotted by the opposition.
The president’s office claimed it was unclear if the required number of lawmakers had been present in parliament during the vote.
Dukanovic heads the long-ruling Democratic Party of Socialists (DPS), which is now in opposition.
If lawmakers vote for the amendments again, the president is obliged to sign them.
Under Montenegro’s religion law adopted a year ago, religious communities must prove property ownership from before 1918.
That is the year when predominantly Orthodox Christian Montenegro joined the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes — and the Montenegrin Orthodox Church was subsumed by the Serbian Orthodox Church, losing all of its property in the process.
The Serbian Orthodox Church, its supporters, and pro-Serbian parties claimed the law could enable the Montenegrin government to impound church property, though officials deny that they intend to do this.
The new government — which came to power after elections in August — said it would rewrite the law to ensure the properties stay in the hands of church, which is based in neighboring Serbia.
Serbia and Montenegro were part of a federation until 2006, when Montenegro declared its independence.
Montenegro is a member of NATO and aspires to join the European Union.
This post was originally published on Radio Free.
Kazakhstan has abolished the death penalty, making permanent a nearly two-decade freeze on capital punishment in the Central Asian country, a statement on the presidential website said on January 2.
The statement said Kazakh President Qasym-Zhomart Toqaev had signed off on parliamentary ratification of the Second Optional Protocol to the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights – a document that obligates signatories to abolish the death penalty.
Kazakhstan instituted an indefinite moratorium on capital punishment in 2003 but retained the death penalty for terrorism-related offenses.
In 2016, the death penalty was imposed on a man who was convicted of a mass shooting in Almaty.
Ruslan Kulikbaev had been the only person on death row in Kazakhstan. He will now serve a life sentence in prison.
Toqaev announced that his country would join the protocol on the abolition of the death penalty in his speech at the 74th session of the UN General Assembly in December 2019.
Russia, Tajikistan, and Belarus are now the only three countries in Europe and Central Asia which haven’t yet signed or ratified the Second Optional Protocol. Belarus is the only country in the region that still carries out executions.
This post was originally published on Radio Free.
The waning days of 2020 were rife with portentous activity in Russia.
The Investigative Committee announced a new criminal case against opposition leader Aleksei Navalny on large-scale fraud charges. The Justice Ministry added five individuals to its list of “foreign mass media performing the functions of a foreign agent” under controversial legislation that could potentially be enforced against almost anyone in the country. New restrictions were imposed on public demonstrations, and blocking streets was criminalized. Online defamation is now punishable by up to two years in prison. The government has taken on new authority to block foreign and domestic websites that it asserts are censoring Russian state-media content.
Denis Volkov, director of the independent Levada Center pollster, says developments like these form “a general context of intensifying pressure by the authorities on the active portion of society.”
The Kremlin’s actions, Carnegie Moscow Center analyst Andrei Kolesnikov adds, show that President Vladimir Putin’s government is feeling anxious in a changing social and political climate as it prepares for elections to the State Duma, the lower parliament house, that must be held by September. Those elections, in turn, are the last scheduled national political landmark before the end of Putin’s current presidential term in 2024.
“A war is getting under way,” Kolesnikov told RFE/RL. “I’m afraid that [in 2021] it will seriously intensify. The situation could become much more confrontational. It is a very dangerous moment.”
Voter Disenchantment
Putin and the Kremlin-controlled United Russia party are in a weak position as the elections approach. The coronavirus pandemic and its attendant dislocations have accelerated social processes in Russia that have been observable for about the last three years. Putin’s own approval-disapproval ratings now are similar to what they were in the restive period of 2011-12, during which he returned to the Kremlin after Dmitry Medvedev’s one-term placeholder presidency.
“Earlier we could speak confidently about the existence of a pro-Putin majority,” Kolesnikov said. “Now it is very hard to say whether it exists, whether it can be mobilized during the elections. Most likely, it is falling apart into several minorities whose members may not be democratically-minded but are unhappy with the current situation.”
A Russian police officer detains a demonstrator during a protest in central Moscow earlier this year.
Primarily, the roots of the dissatisfaction are economic. Although Russia has weathered the pandemic better than many expected, the government forecasts real disposable income to fall by 3 percent in 2020, while outside economists say that figure is 1-2 percent too low. “Incomes were shrinking continuously in 2014-17 and, by the end of 2020, they will be 10 percent lower than in the ‘pre-Crimean’ year of 2013,” wrote RBC economics editor Ivan Tkachyov last month, referring to Russia’s seizure of the Ukrainian region of Crimea in 2014, which gave Putin a massive popularity boost.
For the poorest Russians, the situation became so difficult that the government set retail price caps for some basic foods in December.
Many voters were also disenchanted by the way the constitution was rewritten in the early part of the year in a process that they believed was driven by Putin’s personal interests rather than their good or even the country’s.
“It was clear to everyone that the amendments to the constitution were adopted with one goal in mind – to secure the possibility [for Putin] to run for more presidential terms,” said Boris Grozovsky, an economics columnist and editor of the Events And Texts Telegram channel. “That is why it also ‘nullified’ Putin’s popularity and the legitimacy of the political regime. That is why immediately after the amendments, he had to significantly increase repressive measures both on the level of legislation and in practice.”
Paradigm Shift?
Either instinctively or by design, Putin seems to have shifted his political paradigm. And the clearest example of this shift is the fate of his Direct Line call-in program.
For most of his two decades in power, Putin has held the annual, marathon Direct Line question-and-answer program in which he fielded carefully choreographed questions from average Russians on issues such as the availability of playgrounds, the notorious condition of Russian roads, shortages of medicines, or the plight of teachers or doctors.
In later iterations of the program, regional and cabinet officials were forced to listen in as Putin heard the complaints and then were grilled by the president about why their region was experiencing such a problem. In some cases, the officials returned to screens later in the same broadcast to report, for instance, that road crews had been sent to fill in potholes or that a new playground had already magically appeared.
In short, Putin positioned himself as the traditional Russian “good tsar,” who was ready to rain benefits on the people but who was prevented from doing so by “bad boyars,” or noblemen. This kind of populism played well among much of the Russian public, strongly reinforced by Kremlin-directed state media.
In 2020, however, the Direct Line show was cancelled completely, although a few elements of it were incorporated into Putin’s end-of-the-year press conference with journalists on December 17. At that event, however, no cabinet ministers or regional officials appeared. Putin praised all levels of government for its handling of the coronavirus crisis.
If anyone was to blame for the problems of average Russians, Putin both stated and implied, it was the CIA and other nefarious foreign influences that were determined to restrict Russia in every way. Such statements strongly overshadowed the tiny populist gesture that Putin threw in at the end of the four-hour program when he announced the government would give families 5,000 rubles ($67) for each child under the age of 7.
“Looking at the recent press conference, I had the feeling that Putin was defending the bureaucratic system,” said Mikhail Kasyanov, who was prime minister during Putin’s first term, in 2000-04, and is now an opposition politician. “That is, he defended the power vertical that enables him to run the country.”
“Populism is an effort to appeal to the people, to be on their side, to criticize officials and various bosses while promising citizens that things will be fixed,” he continued. “This time, Putin could not do that since his own negative rating among the majority of Russians is growing. Putin is no longer above the fray, above the bureaucrats.”
Instead of this traditional populist-authoritarianism, “standard authoritarianism” has begun, Kasyanov said, adding that it “could develop into totalitarianism.”
“If automatic systems for running the country are developed,” he said, “Putin won’t have to communicate with the public or meet with business leaders or political elites. He will simply sign little pieces of paper.”
Analyst Kolesnikov agreed that Putin’s old populist approach no longer works as his long reign in power comes up against the growing discontent.
“In this personalized political system, he has come to personify not only everything that is good, but everything that is bad as well,” he told RFE/RL. “And that is where the problems start.”
Kremlin critic Aleksei Navalny gestures during a court hearing in Moscow in 2017.
Kremlin political consultants have not forgotten the wave of mass protests that swept Russia in 2011-13, driven mainly by anger over evidence of fraud benefitting United Russia in December 2011 parliamentary elections and dismay over Putin’s return to the presidency in 2012.
“The people want change,” Kasyanov said. “This is clear. More than half of Russians want change. But the people sitting in the chairs of power fear such changes. They fear that they could go too far. I mean, street protests. We know that our leaders, if they listen to anything, only listen to street protests. We saw that in December 2011 and early 2012.”
That is why the Kremlin has focused its attention on Navalny, Kasyanov said. Russian security agents allegedly attempted to poison Navalny at least three times in recent months, including a near-fatal poisoning with a Novichok-type nerve agent in the Siberian city of Tomsk in August.
In addition, the authorities have opened a new fraud case — who is recuperating from the August poisoning in Germany — that analysts say is aimed at preventing Navalny from returning to Russia. If he does return, he could face prison in connection with the new case and with a previous conviction that he contends was based on fabricated charges.
“Aleksei Navalny is definitely the leader of the street,” Kasyanov said. “When the political struggle intensifies in this way, when the authorities act repressively, then, of course, street protests become the main instrument of struggle against them. So the authorities are trying to remove the leader of any possible future mass protests.”
This post was originally published on Radio Free.
In a year marked by tightened restrictions and unrest, Telegram sent a clear message to authoritarian governments who tried to keep it quiet in 2020. But as the app, which has earned a reputation as a free-speech platform, looks to spread the word in Iran and China, its popularity among messengers of violence and hate remains a concern.
Telegram has emerged as an essential tool for opposition movements in places like Belarus and Iran and won a huge victory when the Russian authorities gave up on their effort to ban the app after two fruitless years during which senior officials continued to use it themselves.
But protesters and open media are not the only ones who find sanctuary in a tool like Telegram. Terrorists, hate groups, and purveyors of gore also see the benefits of encrypted group chats that can reach large audiences without censorship.
Nowhere was the hidden hand of Telegram more apparent in 2020 than in Belarus, where activists and opposition politicians relied on the platform to counter the authorities’ attempts to control the narrative in a crucial election year.
Ahead of the August 9 vote pitting authoritarian incumbent Alyaksandr Lukashenka against a thinned pool of opposition candidates, the Belarusian authorities did their best to intimidate administrators of rogue Telegram channels.
When three Telegram-based opposition bloggers were arrested in June, the rights watchdog Amnesty International decried the pressure against alternative sources of information.
A quick perusal of some of the more sordid open channels on Telegram reveals that it is a place for violence, criminal activity, and abusers, regardless of what Europol says.
“The Belarusian authorities are carrying out a full-scale purge of dissenting voices, using repressive laws to stifle criticism ahead of the elections,” said Aisha Jung, Amnesty International’s senior campaigner on Belarus.
After Lukashenka claimed he had won a sixth straight term, triggering mass protests that continue to bring people onto the streets to contest the outcome, despite a violent police crackdown, it was the authorities who were crying foul.
“You see: a square was drawn in a well-known channel on Sunday — go there. They went. They stood in this square,” Lukashenka said after attempts to block the websites of independent outlets drove the opposition-minded to Telegram. “They drew another one — go there, and then go to the Palace of Independence. This is how they manage.”
In November, the state Investigative Committee was accusing the creators of the Poland-based Nexta channel on Telegram of organizing what it called “mass riots.” By the end of the month, the creators of the opposition-friendly news source had been added to the State Security Committee’s list of “persons involved in terrorist activities.”
Claiming that up to 15 percent of the citizens of Minsk were using Telegram and generating 50,000 to 100,000 messages a day to coordinate actions through 1,000 channels, the deputy head of the presidential administration said that “these are huge figures, and we have no right to turn a blind eye to this.”
But by then, even Lukashenka had long accepted the reality of Telegram’s power, using a newly created state Telegram channel to post videos in August of him brandishing an AK-47 and barking orders to security forces from his helicopter.
As the authoritarian leader told friendly members of the press in September: “How can you stop these Telegram channels? Can you block them? No. Nobody can.”
Belarus was not the only one to grudgingly concede to Telegram this year. Russia too, after a two-year battle to ban the app, took the “if you can’t beat them, join them” approach.
“Roskomnadzor is dropping its demands to restrict access to Telegram messenger in agreement with Russia’s Prosecutor-General’s Office,” the country’s communications regulator announced in June.
Shortly afterward, the Communications Ministry admitted that it was “technically impossible” to block the messaging app.
The ban, introduced after Telegram refused to comply with Russian demands that it hand over encryption keys to help fight terrorism, never really stuck anyway.
Telegram founder Pavel Durov: “Over the course of the last two years, we had to regularly upgrade our ‘unblocking’ technology to stay ahead of the censors.”
Despite official efforts to block it, courts, political heavyweights, and even the Russian Foreign Ministry had continued to use the platform. And according to Telegram founder Pavel Durov, use of the app had doubled since the ban, with 30 percent of its 400 million active users coming from Russia.
The Russian entrepreneur had some experience defying the Kremlin, having created and headed the social-networking site VK before he was dismissed as CEO in 2014 after refusing orders to block Russian opposition leader Aleksei Navalny’s site and to hand over information about Maidan protesters in Ukraine.
After Telegram was unblocked, Durov explained that “over the course of the last two years, we had to regularly upgrade our ‘unblocking’ technology to stay ahead of the censors.”
The strategy included the formation of a “Digital Resistance” movement employing rotating proxy servers and other means of hiding traffic to circumvent censorship.
“To put it simply, the ban didn’t work,” Durov said.
There was some merit to Russia citing the effort to fight terrorism as a reason for introducing the ban in the first place, considering that its initial demand for encryption keys stemmed from attempts to decipher comments authorities said were made on Telegram by a suicide bomber who killed 15 people in St. Petersburg in 2017.
Going into 2020, Telegram was still dealing with such criticism, including that it was not doing enough to prevent extremist groups like Islamic State from disseminating information.
Among the steps taken by Telegram were the introduction of an ISIS Watch feature that publishes daily updates on banned terrorist content and encouraging users to report extremist content.
Europol even lauded Telegram’s actions, saying in late 2019 that “Telegram is no place for violence, criminal activity, and abusers. The company has put forth considerable effort to root out the abusers of the platform by both bolstering its technical capacity in countering malicious content and establishing close partnerships with international organizations such as Europol.”
Those efforts, as well as Telegram’s role as a public-service beacon during the coronavirus pandemic, appear to have factored into the lifting of the digital blockade.
But they didn’t end criticism that dangerous minds were still exploiting the app’s free-speech policies.
Within hours, the manifesto of a gunman who killed nine people near Frankfurt, Germany, in February was being spread by right-wing extremist groups on Telegram.
A racially motivated shooting in February that left nine people dead in a town outside Frankfurt, Germany, sparked renewed concerns. Within hours of the attack, the perpetrator’s manifesto was being spread by right-wing extremist groups on Telegram.
Scores of white nationalist groups, according to an analysis by Vice News, had made the switch to Telegram after they were kicked off mainstream social media like Facebook and Twitter.
“Telegram makes a lot of sense for those groups: The app allows users to upload unlimited videos, images, audio clips, and other files, and its founder has repeatedly affirmed his commitment to protecting user data from third parties — including governments,” Vice News wrote.
The Counter Extremism Project, an international policy organization formed to combat the growing threat from extremist ideologies, reported in May that it was still finding Islamic State propaganda on Telegram.
In addition, the project said it had found “multiple white supremacist and neo-Nazi groups” on Telegram celebrating the shooting death in the United States of an unarmed black man, as well as encouraging mass shootings and violence against African Americans.
A quick perusal of some of the more sordid open channels on Telegram reveals that it is a place for violence, criminal activity, and abusers, regardless of what Europol says.
Multiple channels host full-length, uncensored videos showing the perpetrator of the 2019 Christchurch mosque shootings in New Zealand preparing for and carrying out the attacks in which 51 people were killed and 40 injured.
Multiple videos of school shootings are available, and uncut videos of ordinary people being stabbed, shot, bludgeoned, or mutilated are ubiquitous.
Compromising sex videos of Russian celebrities and politicians are there for the watching, as is a recent live-streamed incident in which a popular vlogger reportedly accepted money to lock his girlfriend outside in subzero temperatures, where she died.
Amid the recent fighting between Azerbaijan and Armenia over the breakaway territory of Nagorno-Karabakh, videos apparently taken by Azerbaijani soldiers and distributed on Telegram show executions, including beheadings, as well as other abuses of POWs. The videos prompted an investigation by the Council of Europe, Europe’s top human rights watchdog.
Ihar Losik is the administrator of the Telegram-based Belarus Of The Brain channel and a media consultant for RFE/RL.
Now, as 2021 begins, the fight over Telegram is continuing — and expanding.
In Belarus, the authorities continue to pursue charges against Telegram bloggers they accuse of fomenting unrest over the outcome of the August presidential vote. Among them is n mid-December, Losik announced that he had launched a hunger strike to protest his treatment and potential eight-year prison sentence.
In Iran, the execution of activist and journalist Ruhollah Zam has sparked international outrage. Zam, who headed AmadNews — which had been suspended by Telegram in 2018 for publishing information about Molotov cocktails but was revived under a different name — was credited with helping inspire anti-government protests in 2017.
And in China, where Telegram is banned, the app has seen a surge of millions of new users as other messaging platforms have suffered outages.
Both Iran and China have come into focus among free-speech advocates in recent years, including efforts to develop technologies such as Signal and Tor that allow people to access the Internet and communicate privately.
“We don’t want this technology to get rusty and obsolete. That is why we have decided to direct our anti-censorship resources into other places where Telegram is still banned by governments — places like Iran and China,” Durov wrote on his personal channel after Russia unblocked Telegram. “We ask the admins of the former proxy servers for Russian users to focus their efforts on these countries.”
“The Digital Resistance movement doesn’t end with last week’s cease-fire in Russia,” Durov wrote in June. “It is just getting started — and going global.”
This post was originally published on Radio Free.
The United Nations has condemned Iran for executing a man convicted of murder when he was 16 years old, saying the punishment violated international law.
The UN human rights office in Geneva said Mohammad Hassan Rezaiee was executed on December 31.
He was the fourth juvenile offender put to death in Iran this year, the office said.
“The execution of child offenders is categorically prohibited under international law and Iran is under the obligation to abide by this prohibition,” UN rights office spokeswoman Ravina Shamdasani said in a statement.
The UN high commissioner for human rights, Michelle Bachelet, “strongly condemns the killing,” she added.
Shamdasani said the office was “dismayed that the execution had taken place despite” its efforts to engage with Tehran on the case.
“There are deeply troubling allegations that forced confessions extracted through torture were used in the conviction of Mr. Rezaiee,” Shamdasani said, along with “numerous other serious concerns about violations of his fair-trial rights.”
Iran regularly forces confessions from prisoners, often under duress or torture, rights groups say.
Amnesty International said Rezaiee was arrested in 2007 in connection with the fatal stabbing of a man in a brawl and had spent more than 12 years on death row.
Iran is among a handful of countries that execute juvenile offenders.
Amnesty International said it is aware of at least 90 cases of people in Iran currently on death row for crimes that took place when they were under 18. The rights organization said the real number is likely to be far higher.
Rights groups have called on Iranian authorities to urgently amend Article 91 of the 2013 Islamic Penal Code to abolish the death penalty for crimes committed by people under 18 in line with Iran’s international obligations.
Iran is one of the world’s leading executioners. Amnesty International said in April that at least 251 people were executed by Iranian authorities in 2019.
This post was originally published on Radio Free.