10 August: Kirill Barabash, Alexander Sokolov, Valery Parfyonov in Moscow's Tverskoi District Court. Source: Alexei Abanin / RTVI.
We continue our partnership with OVD-Info, an NGO that monitors politically-motivated arrests in Russia. Every Friday, we bring you the latest information on freedom of assembly.
This week, the Moscow trial against the “Army of the People’s Will” ended with the defendants given jail terms of up to four years. The four defendants — Yuri Mukhin, ex-chief editor of the newspaper Duel, and his associates RBK journalist Aleksandr Sokolov, Valery Parfenov and Kirill Barabash — had been charged with continuing the activities of the banned Army of the People’s Will organisation under cover of a group advocating the holding of a referendum.
Parfenov and Barabash were both sentenced to four years in a general regime prison colony. Mukhin was given a four-year suspended sentence, while Alexander Sokolov was sentenced to three-and-a-half years in a prison colony. The Army of the People’s Will was banned in 2010 for a publishing a leaflet advocating the holding of a referendum and an amendment to the Russian Constitution to provide for the public accountability of government officials. Three of the defendants had been held in pre-trial detention for almost two years.
