Paul
Goble
Staunton, April 12 – Yevgeny Vitishko,
the environmental activist who is serving a three year sentence in a Russian
penal colony for exposing official malfeasance in the run-up to the Sochi
Olympiad, has declared a hunger strike after the Russian Supreme Court refused
to review the way his case has been handled.
The activist, who was initially
given a suspended sentence for his activities, had that suspension revoked and
was sent to the camps. He and his
lawyers appealed that decision to the Supreme Court, but at the end of March,
he was informed that his appeal had been denied (bellona.ru/articles_ru/articles_2015/vitishko_hunger-strike).
In protest, he has begun a hunger
strike possibly in the hope that the Tambov court which is scheduled to hold a
hearing on his case this Wednesday, April 15, will re-instate his suspension
and allow him to go home. But the odds of
that happening seem very long against, the Bellona organization says.
While in the camps, Vitishko has
taken up the causes of his fellow prisoners. His jailors have thus found him
guilty of violating prison rules eight ties and subjected him to seven spells
of disciplinary treatment. Most of these
came after he protested the mass beating of prisoners by their jailors to the
press.
In a related development, one that
highlights the contempt many Russian officials and even ordinary Russian
citizens feel for their environment, the Kavkaz-uzel news agency reports that
much of the Olympic Village constructed for the Sochi Games at such high cost
has been vandalized and left uninhabitable (kavkaz-uzel.ru/articles/259804/).
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