Russia jails head of independent election watchdog for five years

14/5/2025 17:59

The head of Russia's only independent election watchdog was sentenced on Wednesday to five years in a penal colony after being found guilty of working with an "undesirable organisation".



Grigory Melkonyants, co-chair of the Golos movement, was arrested in August 2023. He pleaded not guilty at his trial.



Human rights campaigners say the case against the 44-year-old is part of a wider crackdown on civil society that has intensified since Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.



News outlet Mediazona said Melkonyants called out to supporters in the courtroom and urged them not to be downhearted over the verdict.



Golos, which means both "voice" and "vote" in Russian, first angered the authorities by publicising evidence of what it said was fraud in a 2011 parliamentary election that led to opposition protests, and then in the presidential vote that returned Vladimir Putin to the Kremlin for a third term in 2012.