The Human Rights Centre “Memorial” is outraged over the ruling by a Russian court to close down the “Russian – Chechen Friendship Society" and warns that this proves the worst fears about the real aim of the law against extremism passed this summer

As on the sixteenth day of every month, hundreds of thousands of Belarusians and people showing their support in other countries will be lighting Candles for Freedom in their windows, staging street actions, etc, in solidarity

In Minsk more than one hundred Protestants have been on hunger strike for a week in protest at the decision of the Belarusian authorities to take their church and the site it’s on away from them

All of those who wish to honour the memory of Anna Politkovskaya are asked at 9 o’clock this evening to turn off the lights in their flats and to burn a candle in their window.

The society’s executive director Stas Dimitrievsky was convicted in February over the publication of an appeal from Maskhadov and Zakaev in the newspaper “Pravozashchita” [“Human rights defence”]. Since his colleagues failed to condemn him for this the organization is to be liquidated.

A Russian prosecutor wants the Society closed down claiming that its head, Stas Dmitrievsky, has been prohibited from engaging in human rights activities (!) for four years. Dmitrievsky’s recent appeal to the European Court of Human Rights may however also have something to do with this …

The famous human rights defender and widow of Andrei Sakharov gave this interview after Putin broke his silence when asked in Germany about the journalist’s murder

The Belarusian authorities may be trying to use serious criminal charges against political opponents in order to remove and to try to discredit them

Following on from the transport blockade of Georgia, the Russian authorities have launched a campaign against members of the Georgian community in the Russian Federation

On Tuesday outside the Russian Embassy in Kyiv and in Lviv, Ukrainians lit candles in Anna Politkovskya’s memory and read from her book about the war in Chechnya

Statement from the Committee on Monitoring Press Freedom in the Crimea and the Crimean Association of Free Journalists

The Head of the review commission of the Federal national-cultural autonomy “Ukrainians in Russia”, Natalya Kovalyova, was brutally assaulted in Tula

Somebody wise said that “the significance of a person is defined by the goal for which they live and the price they are prepared to pay to achieve that goal”. The vile murder in the entrance of her own block of flats was, it would seem, the price which Anna Politkovskaya paid to achieve her objective – to tell the truth whatever the cost, as a journalist and as a citizen.

Ukrainians will gather and light candles in memory of the slain journalist and human rights defender on Tuesday 10 October in Kyiv.

When there seemed no justice, defence and compassion, Anna Politkovskaya was the last hope for very many people. Her impassioned words gave them strength and confidence that they had not been abandoned to their fate where absolute fear, violence and lawlessness reign.

They are in no doubt that she was killed because of her fearless journalism and call on the authorities to find those responsble and bring them to justice

Around one and a half thousand people attended a meeting on Sunday 8 October in memory of Anna Politkovskaya, murdered on Saturday. Anna Politkovskaya wrote a lot about the war in Chechnya and about grave human rights violations committed by Federal troops and the Kadyrov regime

Anna Politkovskaya, journalist, human rights defender and fierce critic of Russia’s actions in Chechnya and elsewhere, was gunned down today in Moscow

Boris Akunin, who believes he is one of the many victims of the anti-Georgia campaign, says: “the issue is not one of cancelling flights, and not of economic or diplomatic steps. It concerns what is happening in Russia, and what remains in the mass consciousness from all this dirt.”

It had earlier been reported that the police were taking lists from schools of students with Georgian names in order to get details about their families