Watchdog

Hearings on whether to jail outspoken Kremlin critic Aleksei Navalny have been postponed until May.

The hearings were initially scheduled to start April 23, but Moscow's Lyublino District Court postponed them to May 13 after it learned that Navalny had not received a subpoena.

Navalny is serving two suspended sentences following convictions on theft and embezzlement charges that he calls politically motivated.

The hearings will determine whether a suspended 5-year sentence that Navalny received in 2013 should be replaced by a real prison term because of a finding by the Federal Penitentiary Service that Navalny's political activities amount to a "systematic disturbance of public order."

Navalny's recent efforts have been aimed at uniting Russia's disjointed array of opposition parties ahead of Russia's 2016 parliamentary elections.

Last week, Navalny and his Party of Progress joined ranks with the political party of slain Kremlin critic Boris Nemtsov in a bid to form a democratic alliance and overcome years of bickering.

Based on reporting by TASS and Interfax

BAKU -- A prominent human rights lawyer in Azerbaijan, Intiqam Aliyev, has been sentenced to 7 1/2 years in prison after a trial that he called politically motivated.

The Baku Court for Grave Crimes found Aliyev guilty of tax evasion, illegal entrepreneurship, and abuse of office on April 22 and sentenced him the same day.

In his last testimony before his sentence was pronounced, Aliyev called the case against him politically motivated, saying he was prosecuted as punsihment for bringing more than 200 cases to the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg.

Aliyev was arrested in August.

He is one of several activists, journalists, and government critics jailed over the past year in what rights groups say has been been a growing clampdown on dissent by authorities under President Ilham Aliyev. The two men are not related.

Last week, the same court sentenced human rights activist Rasul Cafarov (say: Jafarov) to 6 1/2 years in jail on similar charges.

Amnesty International has recognized Aliyev and Cafarov as prisoners of conscience.