Fr Aleksandr intends to appeal through his lawyer as soon as the latter has received the court’s written decision, he told Forum 18 from outside Russia on 22 July. Police had found the video of the sermon on the Mother of Solidarity YouTube channel, on which the church streamed and uploaded its services, Fr Aleksandr explained to Forum 18. On Sun

Moscow’s Preobrazhensky District Court sentenced Buddhist leader Ilya Vasilyev to 8 years’ imprisonment on 25 June. He remains in detention in the capital’s Matrosskaya Tishina prison. The judge convicted Vasilyev of “Public dissemination of knowingly false information about the use of the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation, for reasons

An Old Catholic priest has become the latest religious figure to be prosecuted for preaching against Russia’s war in Ukraine. A St Petersburg court found Fr Aleksandr Khmelyov guilty of “discrediting” the Russian Armed Forces in a sermon he gave over three years ago and posted on his church’s YouTube channel. Fr Aleksandr left Russia on 11

According to ECI, SIR is also meant to weed out non-citizens, who are generally thought to be illegal migrants from Bangladesh and Nepal. But the Supreme Court told the ECI that is not the task of the ECI to check on citizenship as it is the job of the Central Home Ministry. But the ECI argued that non-citizens have to be weeded out because only ci

With petitioners in the court estimating that about 940,000 voters in Bihar will be facing disenfranchisement as a result of the SIR, the Supreme Court had warned the ECI that it would “step in if mass exclusion takes place”. The court said on Tuesday that the ECI is a constitutional body that has to abide by the law. The ECI is to release the