30 Sep 2010 | Index Index, minipost, News and features
Top Russian investigators say they guarantee to pursue 19 cases of murdered journalists presented to them by a delegation from the Committee to Protect Journalists.
The CPJ delegation led by CPJ Chairman Paul Steiger and board member Kati Marton met with the Chairman of the Investigative Committee Bastrykin and other investigators examining the cases.
CPJ representatives met with the Investigative Committee in September 2009 to discuss unsolved cases concerning Russian journalists. This year they returned for an update.
The investigator told CPJ delegation that Alkhazur Bashayev, alleged murderer of journalist Natalya Estemirova is alive. Authorities are trying to locate his whereabouts in Russia. Bastrykin also said he will find and arrest the suspected murderer of Anna Politkovskaya, who has fled in Europe.
30 Sep 2010 | Index Index, minipost
The Supreme Court is to decide next week whether members of Westboro Baptist Church have the constitutional right to picket military funerals. Al Snyder, the father of a US marine whose funeral was accompanied by the protesters’ anti-gay and anti-Catholic demonstrations is seeking damages for emotional distress. The fundamentalist church, which has said that it plans to protest outside the court, will argue on 6 October that its actions are protected under the First Amendment. Snyder says the decision isn’t a free speech issue but a “case of harrassment“.
30 Sep 2010 | Index Index, minipost, News and features
Human rights campaigner Surat Ikramov was found guilty on libel charges on 28 September for an article he published about the suspicious death of singer Dilnura Kadyrjanova in 2007.
Ikramov, head of the Initiative Group of Independent Human Rights Activists of Uzbekistan, was fined 100,000 som (around $60) and ordered to publicly refute the article by publishing approved corrections. Authorities claimed the death of Kadyrjanova, who had been the mistress of a prominent police chief, was suicide. Ikramov’s report suggested that the police chief had used his position of power to prevent a full murder investigation.
28 Sep 2010 | Index Index, minipost
A group of Russian artists have threatened to boycott an exhibition at the Louvre over the removal of works deemed offensive to Vladimir Putin. Seven painters have said they won’t partiicpate because of a ban on Avdei Ter-Oganyan’s “Radical Abstractionism” series, originally created in 2004. A culture ministry official told newspaper Ria Novosti that a boycott could not take place because the artwork had already been shipped to Paris. Ter-Ognayan wrote on his website that the boycott would draw attention to the “conflict between art and the authorities”.
Read more on Avdei Ter-Oganyan here.
