Another item from our news desk:
PEN America Honors Jailed Ukrainian Filmmaker Sentsov
PEN America has announced that it will honor imprisoned Ukrainian writer and filmmaker Oleh Sentsov with its 2017 PEN/Barbey Freedom to Write Award.
Sentsov, a native of Crimea who opposed Russia's March 2014 annexation of the Ukrainian peninsula, is currently serving a 20-year prison term in a maximum-security facility on terrorism charges that he and international rights groups call politically motivated.
The charges against Sentsov "have been condemned by human rights groups as fabrications by a Russian government intent on silencing dissent," PEN America said in a statement on March 29.
Sentsov was arrested in May 2014 on suspicion of planning the fire-bombings of pro-Russian organizations in Crimea.A Russian court convicted him on multiple terrorism charges in August of the same year.
Sentsov has denied all charges against him, saying that a "trial by occupiers cannot be fair by definition."
PEN America said Sentsov is widely regarded for work that includes two short films, A Perfect Day For Bananafish and The Horn Of A Bull, and a full-length feature film, Gamer, which debuted to acclaim at the 2012 International Film Festival in Rotterdam.
His writings include scripts, plays, and essays, and he has continued to produce prolifically from prison, the statement said.
Since 1987, PEN America has honored more than 50 writers worldwide with the Freedom to Write Award.
"The PEN/Barbey Freedom to Write Award is a reminder of the heavy price that writers pay to speak out in societies where free expression is not respected," said Peter Barbey, owner of the Village Voice and director of the Edwin Barbey Charitable Fund, which sponsors the award.
In January, several high-profile members of the Russian PEN chapter, including Nobel Prize laureate Svetlana Alexievich, novelist Grigory Chkhartishvili (who writes under the name Boris Akunin), and poet Lev Rubinshtein quit the organization over its failure to speak out in defense of Sentsov.
From the Ukrainian president:
Another Ukraine development. Here's a report from RFE/RL's news desk:
Ukraine PM Calls For Resignations At Anticorruption Agency
Ukrainian Prime Minister Volodymyr Hroysman has called on the entire state anticorruption agency to resign over persistent technical problems on a website where government officials electronically declare their assets.
Hroysman said on March 29 that the employees of the National Agency for the Prevention of Corruption "are not capable of managing the website" and have left “hundreds of thousands of people” potentially facing imprisonment for missing a deadline for submitting declarations.
There have been numerous complaints from government officials who have said that due to the technical problems they were unable to declare their income and assets electronically before the March 31 deadline.
"I can't submit my own declaration," Hroysman said.
As part of efforts to fight widespread graft, Ukraine has introduced a new anticorruption rule that requires all senior public officials to declare their wealth in a publicly searchable electronic database.
The system is aimed at increasing transparency in government.
The anticorruption agency said more than 100,000 forms were submitted when the online declaration system was first launched in October 2016.
Some officials declared millions of dollars in cash, while others said they owned luxury cars, expensive jewelry, and substantial real-estate holdings.