Watchdog

The director of Amnesty International's branch in Russia says his staff has returned to the Moscow office that they were evicted from earlier in November.

Sergei Nikitin said on November 18 that he signed a new lease agreement with the Moscow property department, after which they were allowed to return to the office, which had been sealed for 16 days.

Nikitin added that the sides agreed that the eviction was the result of a "technical mix-up" and that Amnesty International did not owe any payments on the old lease.

Nikitin posted photographs of the staff returning to the office on his Facebook page.

On November 3, Nikitin announced that the organization's Moscow office had been sealed, a door broken, locks changed, and the alarm system switched off.

The Moscow property department claimed the group owed rent, which the London-based Amnesty denied.

Nongovernmental organizations that are critical of the Kremlin have come under pressure from the Russian authorities since the country adopted a law in 2012 requiring all organizations that receive foreign funding to register as "foreign agents."

With reporting by TASS and Interfax

The wife of jailed Russian activist Ildar Dadin, who has claimed he has been tortured and beaten in prison, says penitentiary authorities provoked a brawl between her husband and a cellmate in order to intimidate him.

Anastasia Zotova told Current Time TV that authorities recently transferred an inmate convicted of a violent crime into Dadin's cell. Zotova told the Russian-language network run by RFE/RL and VOA that the inmate began attacking Dadin without any provocation and her husband defended himself after he understood that prison guards were not going to intervene.

The Russian prison service FSIN reported on November 17 that Dadin had brawled with a cellmate in a dispute "over a water-boiling device."

On November 18, Zotova posted on Facebook that she has "reliable information" that prison authorities have asked prosecutors to open a new criminal case against Dadin for assault, which is punishable by up to two years in prison.

Dadin, 34, was the first person convicted under a Russian law criminalizing participation in more than one unsanctioned protest. He is serving a 2 1/2 year sentence at a penal colony in the northwestern town of Segezha.

Earlier this month, he published an open letter in which he said he and other prisoners had been beaten and tortured at the prison. He has rejected appeals by his wife and lawyers to request a transfer to another prison, saying that he did not want to leave other prisoners undefended.

"I, of course, want him to be transferred to another prison and I will demand that together with his lawyers, mother, sister, friends and relatives," Zotova said. "Because if he stays there, they will kill him."