Watchdog

Jailed Russian opposition politician Aleksei Navalny says he has been reprimanded by penitentiary authorities less than a week after he had been transferred from a penal colony to a correctional facility with harsher conditions.

Navalny said on June 21 on Twitter that he was formally reprimanded on behalf of the warden for a "violation of the inmates' dress code" for wearing a T-shirt at his previous penal colony before the transfer.

According to Navalny, all inmates usually go to the bathroom in the morning wearing T-shirts but no jackets to brush their teeth, shave, and wash. Navalny added that he was the only one reprimanded.

Navalny said that 30 reprimands he received last year were supposed to be annulled in August, but the new reprimand will allow the penitentiary’s administration to preserve all the previous ones, meaning that he might be deprived of parcels from relatives and visits by his family or placed in solitary confinement, where he may be humiliated and even killed.

While Navalny is still able to use Twitter and other social media through his representatives, his daughter said on June 20 that he had been placed in a separate area to create “a prison within the prison.” She said people are not allowed to communicate with him, and the isolation is "purely psychological torture for anyone.”

Navalny was transferred on June 14 to Correctional Colony No. 6 in the town of Melekhovo in the Vladimir region east of Moscow after the Moscow City Court rejected his appeal in May against a new 9-year jail term he was handed on embezzlement and contempt charges.

He was already serving a prison term from an earlier case in a penal colony in Pokrov, also in the Vladimir region.

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5 Things To Know About Russian Opposition Leader Aleksei Navalny

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The outspoken foe of Russian President Vladimir Putin and his supporters have rejected all charges against him, calling them politically motivated.

Navalny, 46, was arrested in January last year upon return from Germany, where he had been treated for a poison attack with what European laboratories defined as a Soviet-style nerve agent.

He was then handed a 2 1/2-year prison sentence for violating the terms of an earlier parole because of his convalescence abroad. The original conviction is widely regarded as a trumped-up, politically motivated case.

Navalny has blamed Putin for his poisoning. The Kremlin has denied any role in the attack.

International organizations consider Navalny a political prisoner. The European Union, U.S. President Joe Biden, and other international officials have demanded that Russian authorities release him.

A human rights group says Iran has "secretly" executed Kurdish political prisoner Firuz Musalu without even informing his immediate family that the punishment was being meted out.

According to the Hengaw Organization for Human Rights, which monitors Kurdish areas in western Iran, Musalu was executed inside the Urmia Central Prison on June 20. Not even his lawyer was informed, the group added.

The 31-year-old had been sentenced to death by the Revolutionary Court of Urmia on charges of “waging war against God through membership of an opposition group."

Without mentioning Musalu's name, the Fars news agency, which is affiliated with the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps, quoted the chief justice of West Azerbaijan as saying that a person had been executed as punishment for "killing two border guards" in the northwestern Iranian province.

"The Public Relations Department of the Judiciary of West Azerbaijan Province has confirmed the execution of this political prisoner," Hengaw said in a statement noting that "some of the criteria for a fair trial were not observed even according to internal standards and that the security services prevented his case from being sent to the Supreme Court."

The Statistics and Publication Center of the Human Rights Activists in Iran NGO says that, from the beginning of January to December 20, 2021, at least 299 people were executed in Iran, while another 85 were sentenced to death. Four children were among those executed.

Some human rights sources, including the Human Rights Activists News Agency (HRANA), have stated that more than 85 percent of executions in Iran are carried out "in secret and without official and public information."

According to Amnesty International, Iran has had the highest number of executions in the world since 2017. More than half of the world's recorded executions take place in the country.

With writing and reporting by Ardeshir Tayebi