A Russian activist who was jailed after raising concern about the environmental impact of the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi has gone on a hunger strike.
The Environmental Watch on North Caucasus, a nongovernmental organization focusing on the southern Russian region where the Sochi Games were held, said that Yevgeny Vitishko began a hunger strike on April 7 to protest the Supreme Court's refusal to consider his appeal on March 20.
Vitishko was initially handed a three-year suspended sentence in 2012 for spray-painting the fence of a property in a forest where construction was banned.
But In December 2013, a court in the city of Tuapse ruled that he had violated the terms of the sentence and sent him to prison.
A higher court upheld that decision in February 2014.
The prominent Moscow-based human rights group Memorial considers Vitishko a political prisoner, and Amnesty International has named him a "prisoner of conscience."
