Two ex-prosecutors accused of bribe-taking were sentenced to four-year imprisonment by a Moscow court, the RIA Novosti news agency reported Monday.
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November 27, 2006A Moscow district court has sentenced the editor in chief of an extremist publication to five years in prison for provoking ethnic hatred and making extremist calls.
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November 20, 2006Leader of an opposition youth movement in Belarus has been sentenced to 1.5 years in prison for failing to officially register it with state agencies.
Dmitry Dashkevich, a student majoring in philology and co-chairman of the Young Front movement, has been found guilty of organizing activities of an unregistered non-governmental organization, Interfax reports.
Dashkevich was detained in Minsk on September, 15.
Meanwhile, activists of the Young Front are staging protests in front of the court building. Dozens of young people holding flowers and photos of Dashkevich chant slogans demanding to free the young man.
Former presidential candidate Alexander Milinkevich is taking part in the protest action, watched by EU and U.S. ambassadors.
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November 1, 2006Russia’s highest court on Monday rejected a legal challenge by jailed oil tycoon Mikhail Khodorkovsky against official regulations that forbid prisoners to share food with each other, The Associated Press reported Monday.
The Supreme Court rejected Khodorkovsky’s appeal of the nationwide regulation and ruled that it will remain in place, court spokesman Pavel Odintsov said. Khodorkovsky launched the challenge after prison authorities put him in an isolation cell for 10 days in June after finding food that belonged to another prisoner in his bag. In the appeal, cited on his supporters’ Web site, Khodorkovsky said the ban on sharing food violates Russian and international law.
Khodorkovsky, who was convicted in May 2005 of fraud and tax evasion in a trial Kremlin critics claimed was rigged, is serving an eight-year sentence in a Siberian prison 5,000 kilometers (3,000 miles) east of Moscow, near the Chinese border. In August, he lost an appeal to serve his sentence in the Moscow area, where he is registered and resided before his October 2003 arrest.
Supporters see the imprisonment of Khodorkovsky, once Russia’s richest man, and the dismantling of his oil empire as a Kremlin-driven campaign to eliminate a political rival and boost state control of the strategic energy sector.
In April, Khodorkovsky spent several weeks in an isolation cell after he was slashed in the face by a fellow inmate while sleeping. The tycoon has been placed in solitary confinement for infractions of prison rules three times.
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October 31, 2006
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