Memorial Human Right Centre: The number of political prisoners keeps growing in Russia

Since Memorial’s last publication of the list on October 30th last year, the number of political prisoner has grown from 46 to 50 people. Although 10 people have been removed from the list, an additional 14 new ones have been added. 

The full list of people who are considered political prisoners by the Memorial Human Rights Centre and their background is available at the following link.

The new cases of political prosecutions follow similar patterns that have been  employed in the past. These include direct falsification of evidence, arbitrary and expanded interpretation of the statutes of the criminal law, use of illegally or irresponsibly worded statutes of the legislation, groundless criminal interpretation of factual circumstances, or a combination of these cases.

The Memorial emphasizes that the list is incomplete. It is highly probable that a large number of criminal cases meet the criteria of being a political prisoner, however, the organization has not been able to obtain enough information to either make a final conclusion or has not completed the investigation based on the information that they have received.

This, in particular, concerns a large number of criminal cases against Ukrainian citizens, however, it also includes cases of charging Muslims with extremism under the articles of the Russian Criminal Code. 

Read the full article here.