Belarusian dissident Vasily Parfenkov has been sentenced to four years of imprisonment following his hearing on Thursday. He was convicted of breaking the window of a parliamentary building during protests against President Lukashenko’s re-election on 19 December. He will also have to pay pay 14m roubles ($4,700) in compensation for damage to state property. Parfenkov is an active supporter of opposition candidate Vladimir Neklyayev.
A solidarity rally in support of Belarus’s political prisoners is being held at the Belarusian Embassy in London on Saturday 19 February.
Young Syrian blogger, Tal al-Mallouhi, has been sentenced to five years in prison by a state security court on espionage charges. Mallouhi, who was 18 at the time of her arrest in December 2009, was accused of spying for the US embassy in Egypt and held incommunicado for nine months before her family was allowed to see her. Before her arrest she ran a blog that focused on poetry, social commentary and Palestinian issues. A poem criticising restrictions on freedom of expression in Syria may be the reason behind her arrest, activists have suggested.
Maung Maung Zeya, a senior photo and video journalist for the Democratic Voice of Burma has been sentenced to 13 years in prison. He had led a team of journalists who smuggled video footage out of Burma until he was arrested last April photographing the aftermath of bomb attacks in Rangoon. His sentencing comes two months after his son, Sithu Zeya, was imprisoned for eight years on similar charges, and just days after blogger, Kaung Myat Hlaing, had 10 years added to his original two-year prison sentence.
The former editor-in-chief of Playboy Indonesia has begun a two-year prison sentence for publishing images of women in underwear. Erwin Arnada was found guilty of violating indecency laws during a closed trial at the Supreme Court in August, overturning the acquittal decided by South Jakarta District Council in 2007. Islamic hardliners launched legal action against Arnada in 2006, attacking Playboy Indonesia offices shortly after the magazine’s launch. Spokesman for the Islamic Defenders Front, Soleh Mahmud, said that the case shows “pornography has no place in Indonesia”.
