The Moscow City Court has upheld the sentence against Grigory Melkonyants, co-chair of the election rights advocacy movement Golos (“Vote”). Melkonyants was convicted of participating in the activities of an “undesirable” organization — namely, the European Network of Election Monitoring Organizations (ENEMO) … In May 2025, the Basmanny District Court sentenced Melkonyants to five years in a general-security penal colony; his defense appealed the ruling.
At the appellate court hearing, Melkonyants delivered a final statement in which he criticized the work of the prosecutor’s office and the court, calling their approach to sentencing “careless.” [The statement can be read in the linked article.]
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Diplomatic staff from the embassies of the U.S., France, the Czech Republic, Norway, Switzerland, Austria, and New Zealand, as well as a representative of the European Union, attended the announcement of Melkonyants’s sentence in May.
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