Watchdog

An Armenian court has reduced the sentence of a jailed opposition activist but refused to acquit him of charges related to postelection violence, RFE/RL's Armenian Service reports.

Nikol Pashinian, 34, editor of the daily "Haykakan zhamanak," was sentenced in January to seven years in prison for his alleged role in the 2008 unrest in Yerevan.

A Yerevan district court found him guilty of inciting mass disturbances that left 10 dead and more than 200 others injured.

The appellate court rejected acquittal for Pashinian but cut his sentence by half, leaving him with three years and two months remaining on his sentence.

Pashinian's lawyer, Lusine Saakian, called the court's decision "shameful." Pashinian and the opposition Armenian National Congress, of which he is an active member, say the charges against him are politically motivated.

An amnesty bill passed by parliament in June mandated the immediate release of all opposition figures arrested following the 2008 clashes in Yerevan who were sentenced to up to five years in prison.

The law also stipulates that others who received harsher sentences can be set free after serving only half of their jail sentences. That provision will apply to Pashinian.

A third of the world's jailed journalists are imprisoned in Iran, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ), which says the number of reporters held in the Islamic republic rose to at least 52 in February.

China was next after Iran with 24 jailed journalists and then Cuba with 22. The number of journalists held in Iran was the highest recorded by the New York-based CPJ in a single country since 78 cases were documented in Turkey in 1996.

Several publications in Iran have been banned and many journalists detained since street protests broke out in the aftermath of presidential elections last year.

The CPJ said the number of journalists jailed in Iran rose by five in February from January after 12 members of the media were imprisoned and then seven of them were released.

Of the 52 journalists in jail, five had been held since before the crackdown began last year, the CPJ said. Another 50 journalists have been imprisoned and released on bail during the past several months.

"Iran is entering a state of permanent media repression, a situation that is not only appalling but also untenable," CPJ Executive Director Joel Simon said.

"The Iranian government will eventually lose the war against information, but we are saddened every day that our colleagues are paying such a terrible price."

The disputed reelection of President Mahmud Ahmadinejad in June 2009 plunged the Islamic republic into its deepest internal crisis in its three-decade history and created a rift within the ruling establishment.

Reformist opposition leaders and their supporters say the poll was rigged to secure Ahmadinejad's reelection, an allegation the authorities deny.

Hard-liners have accused opposition leaders Mir Hossein Musavi and Mehdi Karrubi of inciting unrest and called them "enemies of God" -- a crime punishable by death under Iran's Islamic law.

-- Reuters