Watchdog

ST. PETERSBURG, Russia -- The high-profile trial of two activists from a group known as "Set'" (Network) charged with terrorism in Russia's second-largest city, St. Petersburg, has been postponed due to the coronavirus pandemic.

A spokeswoman for St. Petersburg's courts, Daria Lebedeva, told RFE/RL on April 21 that the trial had been postponed indefinitely until restrictions implemented to slow the spread of the coronavirus are lifted,

Viktor Filinkov and Yuly Boyarshinov went on trial in late February. Opposition figures and rights defenders have called the case against the group "fabricated."

Earlier in February, a court in another Russian city, Penza, sentenced seven other activists of the group to prison terms of between six years and 18 years after convicting them of terrorism.

The group members were arrested in October 2017 for allegedly creating a terrorist group with cells in Moscow, St. Petersburg, Penza, and Omsk, as well as in neighboring Belarus.

Belarusian authorities told RFE/RL in February that they weren’t aware of a "Network" cell existing in Belarus.

Mikalay Karpenkau, head of the department for fighting organized crime and corruption at the Belarusian Interior Ministry, said that such "information is fake."

Russian investigators said the group planned to organize a series of bomb attacks in Russia during the presidential election and the World Cup soccer tournament in 2018 "to destabilize the situation" in the country and to organize an armed mutiny.

Rights activists have said the charges are false, while some of those arrested have claimed they were tortured while in custody. The Investigative Committee has rejected the claims.

Amnesty International called the terror charges "a figment of the Russian security services' imagination...fabricated in an attempt to silence these activists."

The London-based human rights watchdog has called the case “the latest politically-motivated abuse of the [Russian] justice system to target young people.”

Two other activists initially arrested in the case, Igor Shishkin and Yegor Zorin, made deals with the investigators and testified against the others.

Shishkin received 3 1/2 years in prison in January 2019, while the case against Zorin was closed in September 2018.

The coronavirus pandemic is expanding threats to media freedom around the world, where authoritarian regimes such as China and Iran are stifling details of the outbreak, Reporters Without Borders (RSF) says in its annual press freedom rankings.

The outbreak is "highlighting and amplifying the many crises" already casting a shadow on press freedom, the Paris-based RSF said on April 21, adding that the pandemic had encouraged some regimes to "take advantage of the fact that people are stunned" to impose measures "that would be impossible to adopt in normal times."

Turkmenistan and North Korea were placed at the bottom of the list of 180 countries. Norway topped the index for the fourth year in a row, and Finland was again the runner-up.

The report, titled Entering A Decisive Decade For Journalism, Exacerbated By Coronavirus, said China and Iran -- in 177th and 173rd place, respectively -- were censoring major coronavirus outbreaks.

The communist regime in Beijing "maintains its system of information hyper-control, whose negative effects for the entire world have been seen during the coronavirus public health crisis," it said, pointing to accusations that China concealed the initial extent of the outbreak.

Russia, in 149th place, is continuing "efforts to control the Internet, using ever more elaborate methods," the report said, pointing to legislation that would allow the country to disconnect the Russian Internet from the rest of the world.

RSF said "the closure of the national Internet" is already a reality in Turkmenistan, where the few users are allowed to view only a highly censored version of the Internet, often in public outlets where their identity is checked.

It also pointed to media censorship in EU member Hungary, where right-wing Prime Minister Viktor Orban's government has passed a special law on false information that was a "completely disproportionate and coercive measure."

"Almost everywhere in Eastern Europe and Central Asia, strongmen are consolidating their grip on news and information," RSF said.

Published annually by RSF since 2002, the World Press Freedom Index analyzes factors such as media independence, self-censorship, the legal framework, and transparency based on a questionnaire filled out by experts.

With reporting by AFP