Watchdog

MINSK -- Two activists from the Belarusian rights group Vyasna (Spring) have been detained in Minsk while distributing cards with the photo of the group's jailed leader, Ales Byalyatski.

The cards distributed by Tatsyana Ravyaka and Uladzimer Labkovich also contained information about Byalyatski's 2011 trial.

The two managed to inform RFE/RL by phone about their arrest.

Byalyatski, who is the founder of Vyasna, also helped found Belarus's opposition Popular Front.

He was sentenced in 2011 to 4 1/2 years on tax-evasion charges that his supporters say were politically motivated.

The charges stemmed from Byalyatski's alleged use of personal accounts in Lithuania and Poland to receive funding from international donors for human rights activism in Belarus.

The U.S. State Department spokesman Marie Harf called on the Belarusian authorities on August 3 to immediately release Byalyatski and other political prisoners in the country.

Amnesty International has declared Byalyatski a prisoner of conscience.

Police in Azerbaijan have detained more than a dozen journalists protesting the apparent renewal of a blackmail and intimidation campaign against RFE/RL investigative journalist Khadija Ismayilova.

The reporters were released after being taken to a police station in the capital, Baku.

The journalists, most of them women, chanted slogans including "Khadija, we are with you!"

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Ismayilova's reports have implicated President Ilham Aliyev, who will run for a third term in October, and his family in improper financial activities worth hundreds of millions of dollars.

Ismayilova, who reports for the Azerbaijani Service of the U.S.-funded broadcaster, responded defiantly to the appearance on the Internet in early 2012 of an explicit video in which she was shown.

On August 1, RFE/RL called on Azerbaijani authorities to investigate the new video, which contains intimate and illegally obtained images of Ismayilova.