A Moscow court on Wednesday sentenced prominent Russian rights defender and election monitor Grigory Melkonyants to five years in prison on charges of involvement with a foreign “undesirable organization.” It’s yet another hideous result of Russia’s perversion of the justice system to punish independent civic activism.
Melkonyants, who has been in pretrial custody since August 2023, is a co-founder of Golos, Russia’s leading independent election monitoring group. In 2013, Golos was one of the first Russian civil society organizations that authorities designated a “foreign agent,” a smearing label that imposes absurd restrictions and penalties, incompatible with international law. Although the government eventually stripped Golos of its registration, that did not stop the group from continuing to monitor elections nationwide.
The charges against Melkonyants stem from Golos’s former membership in the European Network of Election Monitoring Organizations, which Russian authorities banned as “undesirable” in September 2021. Golos was no longer a member at that time, but when it comes to punishing civic activists, the authorities, as usual, have not let facts get in the way.
The Council of Russian Human Rights Organizations, an informal association of the country’s leading groups, condemned the verdict and draconian sentence against Melkonyants, calling them “politically motivated, arbitrary, and lawless.”
In his final statement before the verdict, Melkonyants urged his colleagues and supporters to continue and rejoice in their work: “Monitor [elections], participate … raise the level of honesty and common sense… one step after another, one day after another.”
The list of political prisoners in Russia maintained by Memorial, a leading Russian human rights organization, currently includes over 950 people. The number of politically motivated criminal cases against government critics escalated sharply after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine and new war censorship laws in 2022. Melkonyants is one of the few prominent rights defenders to be handed a prison sentence. Another, Oleg Orlov, co-chair of Memorial, had been sentenced to two-and-a-half years’ imprisonment in February 2024 for repeatedly speaking out against Russia’s war on Ukraine and was released as part of a historic prisoner swap between Russia, the United States, and Germany in August.
Melkonyants’s prison sentence sends another chilling signal to all Russian human rights defenders who continue their work despite great personal risks. The government should free him immediately and unconditionally put an end to politically motivated repression.
