Watchdog

ALMATY -- A jailed prominent defender of inmates' rights in Kazakhstan is reportedly being transferred to the labor camp he has criticized the most.

Vadim Kuramshin's mother told RFE/RL that her son was transferred this week from a detention center in the southern city of Zhambyl to the northern city of Petropavl.

Olga Koltunova said her son is to be sent to a maximum-security prison in the area, which Kuramshin has blamed for the extreme rights abuses taking place there.

Kuramshin was found guilty of extortion and sentenced to 12 years in prison in December.

In August, he had been sentenced to one year of limited movement on the same charges.

Prosecutors ordered a retrial after he participated in an OSCE conference in Europe.

Former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev has denounced recent laws passed in Russia as an "attack on citizens' rights."

In an interview with the BBC in Moscow, Gorbachev said he was "astonished" by the number of controversial laws passed in Russia since President Vladimir Putin's return to the Kremlin.

In the interview, Gorbachev calls on Putin "not to be afraid of his own people."

He also said Putin's inner circle is full of "thieves and corrupt officials."

He said that "if things don't change, Russia will continue to drift like a piece of ice in the Arctic Ocean."

In January, Human Rights Watch accused Putin of unleashing "the worst political crackdown in Russia's post-Soviet history" since returning to the Kremlin for a third term in May 2012.

Based on reporting by the BBC