Russia jails prominent vote monitor for five years

Russia on Wednesday sentenced a high-profile election monitor to five years in prison, part of an intensifying crackdown by the Kremlin against independent critics and opponents.

Grigory Melkonyants, 44, is the co-chair of the Russian vote-monitoring NGO Golos, which records alleged fraud in Russian elections.

"Melkonyants is found guilty and sentenced to five years in a general regime prison colony," state media reported the judge as saying in Moscow's Basmanny district court.

Melkonyants was arrested in August 2023, as part of a crackdown on Kremlin critics and opponents that has accelerated amid Moscow's military offensive on Ukraine.

Prosecutors accused him of working with a European election monitoring association -- the European Network of Election Monitoring Organizations -- outlawed as an "undesirable organisation" in Russia.

Being declared "undesirable" effectively bans the group from operating in Russia and makes anyone who works for or collaborates with them liable to prosecution.

Melkonyants proclaimed his innocence throughout the trial and denounced conditions in the jail where he was being held.

He said he had been forced to change cell eight times and had more than 100 different cellmates since his arrest.

In his final statement to the court earlier this week he said he felt "joy at having become stronger though this ordeal and not losing faith.

"During these years, hundreds of thousands of honest and well-educated people have become observers," he added.

His lawyer Mikhail Biryukov has denounced the charges as "baseless".

The authorities want to "intimidate many independent observers so they give up monitoring or remain silent about what they see during these elections", said Biryukov.

Russia had labelled Golos a "foreign agent" -- a term used to stigmatise and target independent civil society and media outlets -- but it disbanded and reformed as a new entity.

The group runs an online interactive map with reports of election violations in national and regional ballots across Russia.

Independent observers have long denounced Russian votes as neither free nor fair.

Russian President Vladimir Putin was re-elected last year with 87 percent of the vote in a contest in which all genuine competitors were barred from standing.

International and domestic observers have for years reported widespread ballot stuffing and voter coercion.

Source: AFP