A leading Cuban dissident and activist has been released from jail as part of a wider prisoner release deal between the Cuban government and the United States. Jose Daniel Ferrer spent more than three years in prison following anti-government protests that swept through the Communist-run island in 2021. Under the agreement brokered by the Catholic…
A hardline Sri Lankan monk who is a close ally of ousted former president Gotabaya Rajapaksa, has been sentenced to nine months in prison for insulting Islam and inciting religious hatred. Galagodaatte Gnanasara was convicted on Thursday for the remarks, which date back to 2016. Sri Lanka rarely convicts Buddhist monks, but this marks the…
“Babaryko is alive!” Those were the words of Viktor Babaryko’s team after seeing the first images of the imprisoned Belarusian opposition politician in more than 630 days. Arrested in 2020 as he tried to run for president against authoritarian leader Alexander Lukashenko, Babaryko was then held incommunicado behind bars as extra punishment. His political team…
The parents of a teenage boy who killed nine children and a security guard in a mass shooting at a school in Serbia last year have been jailed. The boy’s father, Vladimir Kecmanoviæ, was sentenced to 14-and-a-half years imprisonment on Monday, while his mother, Miljana Kecmanoviæ, was given a three-year prison sentence. Nemanja Marinkovic, an…
A court in Turkey has sentenced the owner and architect of a hotel which collapsed in an earthquake in 2023, killing 72 people, to jail. The owner of the Isias Grand, Ahmet Bozkurt, and architect Erdem Yilmaz, were each given 18 years and five months, the official Anadolu news agency reported. Bozkurt’s son, Mehmet Fatih,…
Ahead of the verdict, Nadezhda Buyanova was led, handcuffed, into the courtroom and locked inside a glass and metal cage. Through the glass, the 68-year-old paediatrician told me what she thought of her predicament. “It’s absurd, just absurd,” the doctor said. “I can’t get my head around what’s happening to me. Perhaps later I’ll be…
