Rovshen Yazmuhamedov, a Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty journalist, was released from detention on 22 May in Turkmenistan after spending more than two weeks in custody. The charges against him are still unclear. It is likely he had been targeted in connection with his work as a journalist.

Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty (RFE/RL) have stated that Rovshen Yazmuhamedov , 30, was released in Turkmenabat, eastern Turkmenistan on 22 May. The charges against him have not been disclosed by the authorities. Rovshen Yazmuhamedov’s family have stated that he was interrogated by security services several times before his detention.

During his detention he was held in a temporary detention facility run by the department of the Ministry of Internal Affairs who are involved in the fight against organized crime and terrorism. His family reported to RFE/RL that the authorities installed surveillance cameras around their home following the detention of Rovshen Yazmuhamedov on 6 May.

Rovshen Yazmuhamedov has been working with the Turkmen service of RFE/RL since September 2012. He is a correspondent and mainly covers social issues.

Please write immediately in Turkmen, Russian, English or your own language:

• Calling on the authorities to investigate the legality of Rovshen Yazmuhamedov’s detention and the allegations that he may have been targeted because of his journalist activities;
• Urging the authorities to immediately disclose the reasons for his detention and provide details about any charges against him;
• Reminding them to ensure that everyone is able to peacefully exercise their right to freedom of expression and association in conformity with Turkmenistan’s obligations under the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights.

The lack of an official explanation for the abrupt expulsion from Russia of U.S. lawyer and former Justice Department official Thomas Firestone earlier this month has led to a flurry of speculation about what may have prompted it.

Firestone, an expert on corruption in Russian law enforcement agencies who worked as a lawyer for the Moscow office of the Baker & McKenzie law firm, was detained at Sheremetyevo Airport on May 5 when returning from a trip abroad. Officers kept him in the airport for some 15 hours before ultimately sending him to the U.S.

The expulsion follows an exchange of insults between the U.S. and Russia last month, when the U.S. released a blacklist of 18 Russian officials allegedly implicated in human rights violations who were banned from entering the U.S., and Russia responded with a similar blacklist of 18 U.S. officials.

“I don’t know what the reason for Firestone’s expulsion was, but [it's true that] he was very active in advocating for the release of Sergei Magnitsky in 2009 and that he made a number of requests to Russian officials asking them for his release,” Hermitage Capital head William Browder said by phone Tuesday.

If it’s true that Firestone was expelled over the U.S. Magnitsky Act, he wouldn’t be the first American citizen to face repercussions from the so-called Anti-Magnitsky list.

Chris Smith, a top U.S. lawmaker, was refused a Russian visa earlier this year and blamed it on his vocal backing of the U.S. Magnitsky Act.

Magnitsky was imprisoned on tax evasion charges in 2008 after accusing officials of stealing $230 million in state funds. He died in jail a year later.

Neither Firestone’s nor Smith’s names were featured on the blacklist published on the Foreign Ministry’s website, but like the the U.S., Russia may have kept a part of the list classified, with top officials hidden to prevent relations from being strained further.

“When Firestone worked for the U.S. government in Moscow, he was involved in many aspects of analyzing the Magnitsky case and working with the embassy to try and stop the attacks on [auditing firm] Firestone Duncan, including a last ditch effort to save Sergei [Magnitsky] and get him out of detention,” said Magnitsky’s former employer Jamison Firestone, whose firm performed legal services for Hermitage Capital.

Read more.

The Council of Europe, the continent’s oldest human rights organization, has announced an agreement to upgrade its Russian office, a sign that Russia takes the 47-member group seriously, a spokesman said, at a time when the Kremlin routinely rejects outside criticism of its rights record.

Turning its information office into a program office with diplomatic immunity will allow the council to assist the Russian government in implementing a list of 27 proposed projects, including an existing plan to create a court of appeals system in Russia.

“This cannot be carried out from [council headquarters in] Strasbourg. We have to have people on the ground, and we have to have people here that can organize all this work,” Secretary General Thorbjorn Jagland told journalists at a press conference in Moscow on Wednesday.

The agreement shows that Russia is serious about the Council of Europe — the only major European-wide organization in which Russia is a significant member — and plays an important role in it, Jagland’s spokesman, Daniel Holtgen, later said by telephone.

During a two-day visit that saw meetings with senior officials, including President Vladimir Putin, and officially ended on Tuesday, Jagland also criticized the so-called “foreign agents” law and called on Russia to respect the right of the LGBT community to hold public demonstrations.

“It goes without saying that authorities have an obligation to protect LGBT people who express their views and demonstrate. This is a fundamental principle in the European Convention on Human Rights,” Jagland said. He urged the State Duma not to pass a bill banning “homosexual propaganda.”

But rather than condemn a controversial July law that forces non-governmental groups that receive foreign funding and engage in vaguely defined “political activities” to register as “foreign agents,” Jagland called on the government not to allow its implementation to harm civil society.

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This is because only 1 percent of verdicts passed in Russia are not guilty, according to official statistics.

Navalny’s conviction could put him in jail for ten years and would cause him to be ineligible to run for office, a recently announced ambition of his.

According to The Moscow Times,

The issue of such a large number of guilty verdicts has not gone unnoticed by the country’s leaders, who seem to be aware that the integrity of Russia’s justice system is one of the main concerns of foreign investors.

During his visit to the 2013 World Economic Forum in Davos, a meeting attended by many politicians and foreign investors, Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev addressed the issue of Russia’s high rate of guilty verdicts, calling it an ”issue of political and legal consciousness.”

As one explanation for judges’ frequent guilty rulings, Medevedev said “judges are almost ashamed of not-guilty verdicts, as it calls the work of investigative agencies into question,” Swiss newspaper Neue ZЯrcher Zeitung reported in January.

Cooperation that is too close between law enforcement authorities and courts has been confirmed by observers, with prosecutors and investigators no longer making a secret of it.

At the meeting with judge Yegorova, Sergei Kudneyev, a chief Moscow prosecutor, said prosecutors had started to become more involved in judicial practice, forming “judicial bodies” in courts.

As an example, he cited hearings in the high-profile Bolotnaya case, in which nearly 30 people have been charged with or convicted of participating in riots on Bolotnaya Ploshchad last May at a protest rally on the eve of Putin’s inauguration.

“They are not even prosecutors, but more like court officials, and it’s no secret that when there are vacancies in courts they are filled with prosecutors,” Kudneyev said. “We have a common mentality,” he added.

Anatoly Yakunin, a top Interior Ministry official, said at the same meeting that he aimed to continue cooperation with courts, emulating his predecessor and current Interior Minister Vladimir Kolokoltsev.

“This love will continue. We can’t exist without one another — that is a fact,” he said, adding that law enforcement officials often needed consultations in courts.

The former Interior Ministry official said the Investigative Committee makes frequent phone calls to Moscow courts to ask judges what is missing in a given case to secure a guilty verdict.

Veteran trial lawyer and human rights activist Valery Borshchyov said investigators have a direct influence on courts in Russia. “An investigator is the dominant person in court. The judge accepts the detention measures suggested by investigators; he protects him from the wrong questions and witnesses. The investigator is the main person encroaching on justice [in courts],” he said.

Even former judge Kolokolov acknowledged that the function of courts had become limited to imposing penalties…

But more often, Kolokolov said, there is simply psychological pressure on judges. “Imagine you’re a judge in a district court and you receive a criminal case that says it was investigated personally by Investigative Committee head Alexander Bastrykin, and the charges were approved by Prosecutor General Yury Chaika. Is it possible that this paper wouldn’t influence the judge’s decision? It’s purely a psychological influence; no one actually forces a judge to violate the law and pronounce a guilty verdict.”

Read the rest of the article here.

The Moldovan authorities must ensure that yesterday’s historic Pride march in the capital Chisinau is the “first of many” and is followed up by other steps in combating homophobic discrimination, Amnesty International said today.

Around 100 people participated in the lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and intersex (LGBTI) Pride parade, the first such event in Moldova.

The march, which was organized by Gender-Doc Moldova, a national NGO working on LGBTI issues, was stopped early due to threats from counter-demonstrators.

“This is a red-letter day for LGBTI rights in Moldova; now the authorities must publicly support Pride marches and enable this event to be the first of many of its kind,” said Amnesty International’s David Diaz-Jogeix, Deputy Director of Europe and Central Asia Programme.

“The abrupt ending of the march shows more still needs to be done in the fight against discrimination in Moldova. If the LGBTI movement is allowed to blossom, a more tolerant society will follow.”

Sunday’s march passed off peacefully but was curtailed after counter demonstrators found out where the event was being held.

Before the parade, an Orthodox Bishop from the city of Bălţi called on priests, Afghanistan war veterans and Chisinau residents to resist the march.

Around a thousand counter-demonstrators gathered in the city centre on Sunday to protest against the march and the Law on Ensuring Equality – the anti-discrimination legislation that came into effect in January.

Amnesty International has called on the Moldovan authorities to amend the law so that it clamps down on discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity in all areas of life.

Discrimination on the grounds of sexual orientation is explicitly prohibited only in employment, while discrimination on the grounds of gender identity is not explicitly prohibited in the law.

“The authorities must publicly acknowledge the seriousness of discrimination against LGBTI individuals and the need to take concerted action to address it,” said David Diaz-Jogeix.

“That means condemning any homophobic remarks made by politicians or members of the public.”

Organizers had to change the location of the march three days before the event due to the fear of counter-demonstrations. The final route was only agreed on Saturday after police warned of a security risk.

In March last year local councils in Bălţi, the villages of Chetriş and Hiliuţi in Făleşti District and the Anenii Noi District took openly discriminatory measures to forbid any kind of promotion of LGBTI rights. Only one council repealed its decision upon intervention by the Ombudsperson.

On 12 June, the European Court of Human Rights ruled that the banning of an LGBTI demonstration in May 2005 in Chisinau had violated the right to freedom of assembly as well as the right not to be discriminated against.

The Azerbaijani authorities must not use the upcoming presidential election as a pretext to silence critical voices and meaningful debate, Amnesty International said following a move to extend criminal defamation laws to the internet.

On 14 May, the Azerbaijani Parliament approved an amendment to the country’s defamation law to impose hefty fines and prison sentences for anyone convicted of online slander or insults.  The new legislation constitutes a further attack of freedom of expression in Azerbaijan.

According to the state news agency APA, those found guilty of slander face a fine of up to 500 Azeri manat (US$637), corrective labour of up to one year or jail time of up to six months. The punishment for an online “insult” is even harsher – fines of up to 1,000 Azeri manat, one year of corrective labour or imprisonment of up to six months.

This is just the latest in ever-more restrictive measures – including actions to muzzle mainstream media outlets and the introduction of harsher punishment for peaceful protesters  – ahead of October’s election.

“The Azerbaijani authorities’ fear of critical voices has already led them to attempt to keep peaceful protesters off the streets and to muzzle the mainstream media. This new law aims to shut down one of the few last resorts of legitimate protest – the internet,” said David Diaz-Jogeix, Deputy Director of Amnesty International’s Europe and Central Asia Programme.

“It’s clear from the timing of these ever-more restrictive measures that the authorities want to prevent any critical voices or meaningful political debate from taking place ahead of October’s election.”

“The high fines proposed under this law will have a chilling effect on freedom of expression, leading to self-censorship among independent voices and activists.”

The government of Ilham Aliyev – who has been in power for the past decade, following a decade of his father being in power – has been keeping a tight grasp on the public opinion by restricting severely freedom of expression in Azerbaijan ahead of October’s presidential election.

In addition to the legislative measures introduced in recent months, opposition candidates have been violently attacked , activists have frequently been detained during anti-government protests, and independent journalists have been attacked or prevented from carrying out their work.

Even before the recent defamation laws, criticism of the President’s family has often provoked a swift and harsh response from the authorities. In March 2012 two musicians were arrested and tortured after they insulted the President’s late mother during a public performance.

The leaders of some of Russia’s largest nongovernmental organizations raised their concerns about a Kremlin crackdown during a meeting Wednesday with U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry.

Kerry, who was wrapping up a two-day visit, met with the NGO representatives at Spaso House, the Moscow residence of U.S. Ambassador Michael McFaul, before flying to Rome later in the day, the State Department said.

“We spoke about the prosecution of NGOs,” veteran rights activist Lyudmila Alexeyeva told reporters as she left Spaso House with fellow veteran activist Lev Ponomaryov.

“He was impressed with our stories,” she said about Kerry, according to Interfax.

She said the meeting did not address  the anti-Kremlin protests associated with Bolotnaya Ploshchad or the Magnitsky Act, which bars Russian officials implicated in human rights violations from traveling to the U.S.

NGOs have come under increasing pressure after the Justice Ministry ordered that hundreds be searched in recent weeks to check their compliance with a November law that requires those that receive funding from abroad and are engaged in political activity to register as “foreign agents.”

Alexeyeva is among the NGO leaders who have refused to register under the law, which she and other critics see as a government attempt to smear the reputation of critical NGOs.

The deputy head of the Moscow office of Human Rights Watch, Tatyana Lokshina, said ahead of the meeting that she wanted to talk with Kerry about an overall crackdown on Russian civil society in the past year.

“The amendments to the legislation infringe fundamental rights,” Lokshina told Interfax.

According to her, more than 250 NGOs have been checked and 30 were told to register as foreign agents or cease their political activity, including independent elections watchdog Golos.

Levada Center, the independent pollster, denied a report in Izvestia this week that said it too had been asked to register as a foreign agent.

The measures have outraged rights activists both in Russia and abroad. The Council of Europe’s human rights commissioner, Nils Muiznieks, slammed the ”foreign agents” law and voiced doubts about the need to conduct the searches during talks with Foreign Ministry Sergei Lavrov and Prosecutor General Yury Chaika last month.

He said at the time yhat he was particularly concerned with the law’s wording, which he said could be interpreted to mean that all human rights activity was political.

In an interview published in Vedomosti on Wednesday, Muiznieks said the checks were paralyzing the work of the whole nonprofit sector. But Russian authorities, he said, were unlikely to react to his complaints.

Kerry’s two-day visit to Moscow is his first to Russia after his appointment as the U.S. secretary of state in February. In addition to the meeting with civil society representatives, Kerry held  wide-ranging talks with President Vladimir Putin and Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov.

Ireland has dropped plans to impose U.S.-style Magnitsky sanctions on Russia after Moscow warned that it might respond by banning Irish parents from adopting Russian children.

The Russian opposition assailed Ireland for the reversal, saying it had not only bowed to Kremlin blackmail but had also shown a lack of leadership as the current president of the European Union.

Irish lawmakers had drafted legislation to blacklist Russian officials implicated of human rights violations in the Magnitsky case. But Russia’s ambassador to Ireland, Maxim Peshkov, wrote to the Irish parliament’s foreign affairs committee in March that any attempt to introduce a Magnitsky list might have a ”negative influence” on an agreement on child adoptions between the two countries.

Several Irish parents subsequently contacted committee members after the letter was made public, expressing concern that pending adoptions for Russian children might be canceled.

Pat Breen, chairman of the foreign affairs committee, said Thursday that lawmakers had decided to scrap the Magnitsky list and instead pass a motion calling on the government to convey the committee’s concern over the death.

“We have reached a motion that fulfils our obligations on human rights,” he said, according to The Irish Times.

One senator, David Norris, told the committee that the Russian government should be “thoroughly ashamed” for ”this use of children,” while Jim Walsh, the senator who proposed the blacklist, expressed disappointment that no sanctions would be enacted, the newspaper said. “But,” Walsh added, “politics is about achieving compromise.”

In Moscow, Vladimir Kara-Murza, a senior opposition member, minced no words in his criticism of Ireland and the Russian government.

“The effect is unambiguous: Ireland, the current president of the European Union, succumbed to the Kremlin’s blackmail and threats,” Kara-Murza said in an interview with the French radio station RFI. “It is with deep regret that it must be said that the blackmail of Putin’s regime has worked.”

But he saw a silver lining. “If there is anyone in the West, in the EU, who still had any illusions, the nature of Putin’s regime has now been revealed in all its glory,” he said.

The motion approved by the Irish parliamentary committee urges the Irish government to use its role as EU president to express concern over the death of Magnitsky in a Moscow prison in 2009. The motion also mentions that the Kremlin’s human rights council concluded last summer that Magnitsky had “died as a result of beatings by prison guards” and that no one had been punished in connection with the death.

Magnitsky was arrested by Interior Ministry officials whom he had accused of defrauding the Russian government of millions of dollars. Those same officials later accused him of stealing the funds together with his employer, the London-based Hermitage Capital, once Russia’s largest foreign investment fund.

Russia banned U.S. parents from adopting Russian children immediately after the Magnitsky list was signed into law, although it has denied any link between the ban and the law.

“The official Kremlin line was that this was all just a coincidence, although everyone understood that it wasn’t but was ashamed to talk about it,” Kara-Murza said Thursday. “The letter that Russian Ambassador Peshkov sent to the Irish parliament … openly said that there is a direct link. The Kremlin is determined to use orphaned children as human shields to protect crooks and thieves.”

A group of top Russian child psychologists, psychiatrists and educators have appealed to President Vladimir Putin to allow about 100 Russian children who were in the final stages of the adoption process to be allowed to join their new U.S. parents.

The open letter says the children had met with the potential parents many times and developed an emotion attachment, but the courts were unable to finalize the adoptions before the government swiftly imposed a ban on U.S. parents adopting Russian children on Jan. 1.

“Even though the media lately have the opinion that a child’s mind is ‘flexible’ and can easily cope with severe emotional trauma, our expertise and knowledge shows otherwise,” the letter says. “The repeated disruption of emotional relationships, especially in children, can lead to severe attachment disorder and other psychiatric disorders.”

Among the 171 signatories are people who have worked with severely traumatized children, including young survivors of the Beslan school hostage tragedy.

The letter says all the children in question were abandoned by their biological parents, and some had begun the adoption process with more than 10 different Russian parents, only to see it fail. Only then were they put up for international adoption.

“After long meetings with the American adoptive parents, the children have grown emotionally attached to them, managed to learn to love them, and have already begun to perceive them as their own daddies and mommies,” the letter says. “It is unacceptable that these little children again have to experience betrayal and abandonment. After such a psychological trauma, they will not be able to trust people, live normally, and successfully develop further.”

The letter also notes that many of the children have serious psychological disorders and health problems that require care unavailable in Russia.

The letter, dated April 12, only attracted public attention this week after one of the signatories, cartoonist and former psychiatrist Andrei Bilzho, posted it on Facebook.

The signatories submitted the letter to Putin’s televised call-in show on April 25, but it was not mentioned on air. Now they are hoping to gather more signatures before formally sending it to Putin, the BBC’s Russian Service reported.

The Kremlin had no immediate comment on the petition. The country is in the middle of an extended May Day public holiday and only returns to work Monday.

Putin has been spending the holiday in his native St. Petersburg, and on Thursday evening he attended a ceremony opening a new stage at the Mariinsky Theater.

The ban on U.S. adoptions is widely seen as the Kremlin’s response to a U.S. decision to blacklist Russian officials implicated of human rights abuses. The Kremlin has denied any link, but Ireland announced Thursday that it would not endorse its own blacklist after Russia threatened to halt child adoptions to Irish parents.

The synagogue and surrounding complex will be handed over to the Jewish Community of Tomsk after the municipality finds alternative housing for some 15 families who are currently living there, Mayor Nikolay Nikolaychuk said, according to Chabad.org.

The rabbi of Tomsk, Levi Kaminetsky, told JTA that the city will invest about $1 million in finding the families apartments.

The wooden synagogue, he said, was built 107 years ago by Jewish Cantonists, young children torn away from their homes to serve in the Czar’s army. It is in need of major renovation and may end up serving as Tomsk’s second synagogue, or a school for the children of the community of a few hundred Jews.

Also last week, a new Torah scroll was introduced into the city’s functioning synagogue, Or Avner, and the cornerstone was laid for the construction of a new Jewish community center.