Russia jails head of election watchdog for five years

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Russia jails head of election watchdog for five years

A court in Russia has convicted one of the leaders of a prominent independent election monitoring group on charges of organising the work of an “undesirable” organisation and sentenced him to five years in prison.

Grigory Melkonyants, co-chair of Russia’s leading election watchdog Golos, has rejected the charges as politically motivated.

The case against him is part of the months-long crackdown on Kremlin critics and rights activists that the government ratcheted up after invading Ukraine in 2022.

Golos has monitored for and exposed violations in every major election in Russia since it was founded in 2000.

Over the years, it has faced mounting pressure from the authorities.

In 2013, the group was designated as a “foreign agent” – a label that implies additional government scrutiny and carries strong pejorative connotations.

Three years later, it was liquidated as a non-governmental organisation (NGO) by Russia’s justice ministry.

Golos has continued to operate without registering as an NGO, exposing violations in various elections, and in 2021 it was added to a new registry of “foreign agents”, created by the justice ministry for groups that are not registered as a legal entity in Russia.

It has not been designated as “undesirable” – a label that under a 2015 law makes involvement with such organisations a criminal offence.

But when it was an NGO, it was a member of the European Network of Election Monitoring Organisations, a group that was declared “undesirable” in Russia in 2021, and the charges against Melkonyants stemmed from that.

Independent journalists, critics, activists and opposition figures in Russia have come under increasing pressure from the government in recent years that intensified significantly amid the war in Ukraine.

Multiple independent news outlets and rights groups have been shut down, labelled as “foreign agents” or outlawed as “undesirable”.

Hundreds of activists and critics of the Kremlin have faced criminal charges.

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