The Dorogomilovsky District Court in Moscow sentenced on 12 April four journalists from student magazine, DOXA, to two years of forced labour. According to the judge, the journalists had called on young people to demonstrate against the Kremlin. They were arrested in April 2021 after a raid on the editorial office. The International and European Federations of Journalists (IFJ/EFJ) denounced the eradication of press freedom in Russia and called for the immediate release of the journalists who were just doing their job.
Russian court sentences 4 student journalists to 2 years of correctional labor - Committee to Protect Journalists cpj.org - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from cpj.org Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
We knew that the transcripts of our hearings would be broadcast. Even though no one listens to you in the courtroom, you can address invisible listeners who will read about it later in the media. And so to demonstrate the full absurdity of the Russian courts we set up what we called a “word auction”: we invited our readers to contribute words, any words, along with a monetary donation. We then went ahead and wove them into our speeches we put the speeches together using the words people sent in. So the speeches ended up pretty absurdist, but we managed to express some of our ideas at the same time. I remember that there were a lot of really wacky and exotic animals, so we would say, like, “we’ve been sitting under house arrest for a long time now, we aren’t able to admire these wonderful animals.” Someone sent in the phrase “bee extinction,” so my colleague Volodya [Vladimir Metyolkin] gave a whole speech about the problem of bees going extinct due to climate change, an