Watchdog

ALMATY, Kazakhstan -- Leading Kazakh opposition figure Zhanbolat Mamai has has lost an appeal and been remanded in custody by a court in the Central Asian nation's largest city, Almaty, on charges of insulting law enforcement officers and distributing "false information," accusations he and his supporters call politically motivated.

The Almaty City Court on April 13 rejected an appeal filed by Mamai's lawyers against his pretrial detention. About a dozen of his supporters rallied in front of the court building during the hearing.

The 33-year-old leader of the unregistered Democratic Party of Kazakhstan was arrested in mid-March on the charges and sent to pretrial detention for at least two months.

Mamai, known for his harsh criticism of the nation's authoritarian government, has been trying to register the Democratic Party of Kazakhstan, but claims he is being prevented from doing so by the government, which he says only permits parties loyal to the political powers to be legally registered.

Kazakhstan has been run by authoritarian President Nursultan Nazarbaev and his successor, Qasym-Zhomart Toqaev, since gaining its independence from the Soviet Union in 1991.

Over the past three decades, several opposition figures have been killed and many jailed or forced to flee the tightly controlled former Soviet republic.

Toqaev recently broadened his powers after Nazarbaev and his clan left the tightly controlled oil-rich nation's political scene following unprecedented deadly anti-government protests in January.

Nazarbaev, 81, resigned as president in 2019, but retained sweeping powers as the head of the Security Council, enjoying almost limitless powers as elbasy -- the leader of the nation. Meanwhile, many of his relatives continued to hold important posts in the government, security agencies, and profitable energy groups.

In January, protests that started over a fuel price hike spread across Kazakhstan because of discontent over the cronyism that had long plagued the country.

Toqaev subsequently stripped Nazarbaev of the Security Council role, taking it over himself.

ST.PETERSBURG, Russia -- A court in Russia's second-largest city, St. Petersburg, has sent artist Aleksandra Skochilenko to pretrial detention for using price tags in a city store to distribute information about Moscow's unprovoked invasion of Ukraine.

The court ruled on April 13 that Skochilenko, who was charged with discrediting the Russian Army, must stay in pretrial detention until at least May 31.

She is accused of replacing price tags in a supermarket with fragments of paper containing "knowingly false information about the use of the Russian armed forces" on March 31.

Skochilenko told the courtroom that her actions were about propagating peace, while at the hearing, people wanted to persuade her that she did something wrong.

"But seeing that so many people came to support me, I feel that [what I did] was not wrong, it was important," Skochilenko said.

A day earlier, police in St. Petersburg detained activist Andrei Makedonov, who also used price tags to send an anti-war message.

The use of price tags for anti-war messages has also been seen in recent days at several stores in Kazan, the capital of Russia's Republic of Tatarstan.

On March 5, President Vladimir Putin signed a law that calls for lengthy prison terms for distributing "deliberately false information" about Russian military operations as the Kremlin seeks to control the narrative about its war in Ukraine.

The law envisages sentences of up to 10 years in prison for individuals convicted of an offense, while the penalty for the distribution of "deliberately false information" about the Russian Army that leads to "serious consequences" is 15 years in prison.

It also makes it illegal "to make calls against the use of Russian troops to protect the interests of Russia" or "for discrediting such use" with a possible penalty of up to three years in prison. The same provision applies to calls for sanctions against Russia.