Crimea court jails Tatar leader Akhtem Chiygoz over rally


Judges in the Russian-controlled Crimea have sentenced Tatar representative Akhtem Chiygoz to eight years in a labor camp for "organizing a mass riot." Chiygoz had worked for a Tatar assembly which Moscow later outlawed.
Human rights watchdog Amnesty International slammed the trial against Chiygoz as a "sham" on Monday.
The case "epitomizes the ongoing persecution of these activists whose only 'crime' is to vocally oppose Crimea's  annexation by Russia," said Oksana Pokalchuk, the head of Amnesty's Ukrainian branch.
Previously, Crimea's top court sentenced Chiygoz to eight years of hard labor over a rally he helped organize in February 2014. The rally was held to protest the upcoming Russian annexation of the peninsula. At the time, Chiygoz served as deputy chief of Mejlis of the Crimean Tatar People, which is a traditional decision-making assembly for the mostly Muslim minority.

Thousands of Tatars showed up for the 2014 protest in front of the Crimea parliament. The event soon turned violent, with two people killed and 79 injured in the scuffle.  Just days later, masked Russian troops took over key state buildings in Crimea and hoisted Russian flags above them. Moscow soon organized a referendum and declared annexation some three weeks later.
First Moscow, then Strasbourg
Russian authorities arrested Chiygoz, who remained a vocal critic of the takeover, in early 2015. Moscow also banned the Tatars' Mejlis in 2016 as an extremist organization, dismantling and jailing many of its activists.
Chiygoz's lawyers are preparing to appeal to Russia's Supreme Court, the Ukraine-based head of the Mejlis, Refat Chubarov, said on Monday.
"One can already forecast its decision - it will support the decision by Crimea's illegal supreme court. Accordingly, our next step will be the European Court of Human Rights," he added.
===========
Read more: 'Living atop a powder keg' - Crimea Tatars fear Russia

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Defining the Biden Doctrine

  In his first major foreign-policy speech as U.S. president, Joe Biden declared to the world that America was back. The international sigh of relief was almost audible amid hopes that former President Donald Trump’s disruptive style was a relic. Biden has pursued an ambitious agenda to repair alliances and forge new ones, curb corruption, arrest democratic backsliding, and tackle climate change, all while managing the fallout from the COVID-19 pandemic, Russian threats to Ukraine, and escalating tensions with China.  It hasn’t all been plain sailing. The decision to withdraw remaining U.S. troops from Afghanistan precipitated the collapse of the country’s government and chaos in Kabul as hundreds of thousands of people fled the Taliban. Plans to share nuclear submarine technology with Australia, at the expense of Canberra’s submarine deal with Paris, soured trans-Atlantic relations.  Ahead of the anniversary of Biden’s inauguration,  Foreign Policy ’s Amy Mackinnon spoke with one of t
Read more

George Soros at the Davos Forum

Dear Friends and Colleagues,   I thought you would be interested in reading George's remarks he delivered at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland this evening.   Best regards, Michael Vachon   George Soros Remarks delivered at the World Economic Forum Davos, Switzerland January 25, 2018 The current moment in history Good evening. It has become something of an annual Davos tradition for me to give an overview of the current state of the world. I was planning half an hour for my remarks and half an hour for questions, but my speech has turned out to be closer to an hour. I attribute this to the severity of the problems confronting us. After I’ve finished, I’ll open it up for your comments and questions. So prepare yourselves. *** I find the current moment in history rather painful. Open societies are in crisis, and various forms of dictatorships and mafia states, exemplified by Putin’s Russia, are on the rise. In the United States, President Trump would
Read more