Russia

The Moscow city court has continued hearings in the murder case of Stanislav Markelov and Anastasia Baburova. The March 15 hearing opened with yet another attempt by lawyer Aleksandr Vassilyev, who is defending Nikita Tikhonov, the man accused of shooting and killing the two victims, to challenge Judge Aleksandr Zamashnyuk, saying he is biased "in favour of the prosecution". That plea, like the...

Roskomnadzor, Russia’s federal supervisory agency for communications, information technology and mass media, has announced a contest for the design of software that it could use to monitor online media outlets for “extremist” content, according to Lenta.ru. The deadline for submitting designs is August 15 and the deadline the agency has set itself for testing submissions is December 15...

Russian investigators have pledged to re-open investigations into the cases of five murdered journalists. Valery Ivanov, Natalia Skryl, Aleksei Sidorov, Yuri Shchekochikhin and Vagif Kochetkov were all killed—or are suspected to have been killed—in connection with their journalistic activities. They are all Writers in Prison Committee (WiPC) of PEN International cases from the last nine years...

Luke Harding, correspondent of the British daily The Guardian who was deported from Russia on February 5, returned to his job in Moscow on February 12 after being issued a new visa by the government. But the paper said Monday its expiry date was not indicated and that he could be forced to leave the country again on May 31, the date his old visa expires, according to Paris-based press freedom...

The International Federation of Journalists (IFJ) on Tuesday accused Russia of stepping back into the shadows of censorship and political intolerance after The Guardian's Moscow correspondent Luke Harding was expelled from the country, apparently in retaliation for writing a story linked to material provided by the whistle-blowing website WikiLeaks. Harding was refused entry at Moscow airport when...

The trial of two people accused of the murder of Stanislav Markelov, a human rights lawyer specialised in Chechnya, and Novaya Gazeta reporter Anastasia Baburova finally began this week in Moscow, nearly two years after they were gunned in the centre of Moscow on January 19, 2009 at the end of news conference by Markelov. Paris-based press freedom group Reporters sans Frontières (RSF) welcomed the...

The Khimki City Court has overturned the defamation conviction of editor Mikhail Beketov, a verdict that had been condemned in Russia and abroad, New York-based press freedom group Committee to Protect Journalists has reported. Beketov had been found guilty last month of slandering Khimki Mayor Vladimir Strelchenko in a 2007 television interview. In the interview, the journalist said his car had...

A “repugnant” defamation conviction has been handed down by a Moscow court to the independent weekly The New Times for a report into police corruption and abuse, according to Paris-based press freedom group Reporters sans Frontières (RSF). The verdict, obtained through false testimony, nullified the newspaper’s solid, truthful investigation headlined “OMON slaves” – in reference to the OMON riot...

Russian and Belgian police are currently searching in the Belgian city of Liège for a man suspecting of being the hitman in the murder of Novaya Gazeta journalist Anna Politkovskaya in Moscow in October 2006. This was confirmed during the weekend by Belgian officials, who – like their Russian counterparts – did not name him. He is also reportedly being sought in his own region in Russia. Sources...

Russia's top investigator, Aleksandr Bastrykin, has ordered the reopening of a probe into a near-lethal November 2008 attack on Mikhail Beketov, editor of the independent newspaper Khimkinskaya Pravda. Bastrykin's order on Thursday comes a day after a court in the Moscow suburb of Khimki convicted Beketov of criminally slandering local mayor Vladimir Strelchenko. The conviction, coming at a time...