Russia’s Supreme Court has ignored the country’s Constitution and the decades of religious persecution under Soviet rule and banned the Jehovah’s Witnesses, labelling them ‘extremist’. It has thus placed 175 thousand believers in the Russian Federation in danger of criminal prosecution for their faith.

Russia’s Supreme Court has rejected two cassation appeals against the overtly lawless imprisonment in Russia of a Ukrainian convicted of an unprovable ‘offence’ allegedly committed in the capital of Ukraine during Euromaidan

A prominent Russian journalist known for articles criticizing Russia’s government and President Vladimir Putin has died at a hospital in St. Petersburg after being severely beaten by unknown assailants

The European Court of Human Rights [ECHR] has found multiple violations of the right to life over Russia’s failure to take preventive measures against the terrorist attack on a school in Beslan in 2004 and over the subsequent storming in which over 330 people, including 185 children lost their lives

Although the official mission of the National Guard is to combat terrorism, many in Russia believe its true purpose is to protect Vladimir Putin and the government.

Russia’s Supreme Court appears to be on the verge of banning the Jehovah’s Witnesses after a Justice Ministry application which claimed that this world faith is ‘extremist’

The arrests come a week after more than 1,000 were arrested during a demonstration organized by leading Kremlin critic and anticorruption activist Aleksei Navalny.

On March 10 Viktor Shur spent his 60th birthday in a Russian maximum security prison, far from his family in Ukraine. He has been imprisoned in Russia since Dec 9, 2014, with his alleged ‘espionage’ seemingly based solely on a photo of an abandoned aerodrome in Bryansk on which cattle now graze

PEN America announced on March 29 that it will honor imprisoned Ukrainian writer and filmmaker Oleg Sentsov with the 2017 PEN/Barbey Freedom to Write Award at its annual Literary Gala on April 25

The Civic Solidarity movement condemns mass detentions and police violence against peaceful demonstrators, calls for a strong reaction by the international community

In spontaneity and sprawl, the weekend protests across Russia were reminiscent of large anti-Kremlin rallies in 2011-2012 that were followed by a steady tightening of government control over the political landscape. But one thing sets the two apart: the striking preponderance of young protesters in their late teens and early twenties

State-controlled media in Russia proved considerably easier to control than the tens of thousands of citizens on March 26 who joined anti-corruption protests called by Alexei Navalny, despite the likelihood of arrests and gratuitous violence from OMON riot police and Russian President Vladimir Putin’s own ‘National Guard’ personal army

If the Belarusian authorities hoped to prevent their crushing of Freedom Day protests being monitored by detaining 57 international observers, they should have used less gratuitous violence against both the monitors and hundreds of other peaceful protesters

We, 48 undersigned organizations from 24 countries, strongly condemn the continuing wave of detentions and harassment of peaceful protesters, journalists, human rights defenders, civil society activists, anarchists and opposition party members in Belarus.

Two Ukrainian journalists were held in a Moscow police station for around 3 hours on Tuesday evening, together with the Russian postgraduate student beaten by the FSB for waving a Ukrainian flag during state-organized festivities marking the anniversary of Russia’s annexation of Crimea

One year after the EU lifted sanctions against Belarus, the government is resorting to harsh and violent repression to break the most massive protests seen since December 2010

There is no real evidence to substantiate the dubious charges against Yury Dmitriev and a recent slanderous attack on state-controlled television has only compounded the suspicion that the prosecution is part of a mounted attack on Memorial and its work exposing perpetrators of the Terror.

Yevgenia Chudnovets was released from a Sverdlovsk region prison on March 6, shortly after her conviction for supposed ‘circulation of child pornography’ was revoked. Many other political prisoners remain imprisoned, often for criticizing Russia’s annexation of Crimea and military involvement in Ukraine

Russian blogger Vladimir Luzgin has asked the Court in Strasbourg to defend his right to state quite correctly that both Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union invaded Poland in 1939. He was left no alternative after Russia’s Supreme Court agreed that this unpalatable truth constituted ‘rehabilitation of Nazism’.

Russians are united only in pride at the Soviet Union’s victory in the Second World War over 70 years ago, according to a survey by the renowned Levada Centre. The survey is, however, telling also in what it does not ask and in the framing of the questions, with this particularly applying to the one question about Crimea.