Watchdog

Police in Moscow detained Russian opposition politician Aleksei Navalny's election campaign chief, Leonid Volkov, on October 5 just hours after he was released, his lawyer says.

Meanwhile, a coordinator of Navalny’s presidential campaign in Rostov-on-Don has also been detained.

Volkov's lawyer, Ivan Zhdanov, wrote on Twitter that his client was detained again despite a Moscow court decision earlier on October 5 to canceled a lower court's decision to sentence his client to 20 days in prison.

It was not immediately clear why Volkov was detained again.

Zhdanov earlier said that the case against Volkov was sent for reinvestigation to Nizhny Novgorod, where he was initially arrested.

Navalny and Volkov were found guilty of calling for an unsanctioned rally in the western Russian city of Nizhny Novgorod and sentenced to 20 days in jail each by different courts in Moscow on October 2.

Navalny is campaigning for next year's presidential election on March 18.

In Rostov-on-Don, campaigners in that southern city said that Anastasia Deineka was detained on October 5 by officers of the local branch of the Antiextremism Center, a federal agency under Russia's Interior Ministry.

It is not immediately clear why Deineka was detained.

Activists said the detention might be an attempt by local authorities to prevent Navalny's supporters from holding an unsanctioned rally planned for later this week.

Deineka is one of many Navalny staffers or supporters to face prosecution as the anticorruption crusader mounts an effort to run in Russia's March 2018 presidential election.

His supporters plan to organize mass rallies across Russia on October 7, despite the Kremlin's warning that organizers of unsanctioned public gatherings will be prosecuted.

BRUSSELS -- The European Parliament has adopted a resolution condemning Russian verdicts against dozens of Crimeans who opposed Moscow's seizure of the peninsula and demanding the release of those who are behind bars.

In a resolution adopted on October 5, the parliament sharply criticized verdicts against nearly 50 Crimean Tatars and other opponents of the Russian occupation and takeover of the Ukrainian Black Sea region in 2014.

It condemned the recent convictions and sentences against Crimean Tatar leaders Ilmi Umerov and Akhtem Chiygoz by Russian-imposed courts on the peninsula, and called for their "immediate and unconditional release."

It also condemned the conviction of Crimean journalist Mykola Semena and demanded that all charges against him be "immediately and unconditionally dropped."

In the resolution, lawmakers urged the European Union to impose sanctions on Crimean and Russian officials who are directly responsible for the cases of Semena, Umerov, and Chigoz.

They called for "unhindered access of international human rights observers, including specialized structures of the UN, OSCE [Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe] and [the Council of Europe], to the Crimean Peninsula in order to investigate the situation on the peninsula and for the establishment of [an] independent monitoring mechanism."

Semena, an RFE/RL contributor, was convicted on September 25 on separatism charges and handed a 2 1/2-year suspended sentence and a ban on future journalistic activity.

Umerov was convicted of separatism on September 27 and sentenced to two years in a colony settlement, a penitentiary in which convicts usually live near a factory or farm where they are forced to work.

Chiygoz was convicted on September 11 of organizing an illegal demonstration and sentenced to eight years in prison.

Russia seized Crimea in March 2014, sending in troops and staging a referendum denounced as illegal by dozens of countries, after Russia-friendly Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych was pushed from power by mass protests in Kyiv.

The United States and the EU have condemned Russia's prosecution of Crimeans who opposed its seizure of the peninsula.

A UN human rights report issued on September 25 said that Russia's occupation of the region has been marked by disappearances and torture, infringements of the Geneva Conventions, as well as violations of international law.

With reporting by Rikard Jozwiak in Brussels