Amnesty International has urged the Russian authorities to provide jailed activist Andrei Pivovarov's relatives and lawyers with information about his current whereabouts and stop what it called his "forced disappearance."
Pivovarov, the former executive director of the now-defunct pro-democracy Open Russia movement, was detained in May 2021 after being taken off a Warsaw-bound plane just before takeoff from St. Petersburg and sentenced to four years in prison in July 2022 on a charge of heading an "undesirable organization."
His family and lawyers have said that he has been incommunicado since January 18.
Amnesty International said in a February 17 statement that Pivovarov had been kept without contact with the outside world for almost one month.
In late December, Russian authorities said Pivovarov was transferred from a detention center in the southwestern region of Krasnodar to a transit prison in St. Petersburg, from which he was to be sent to an unspecified prison.
The process of transferring convicts in Russia and many other former Soviet republics, known as "etap," involves trains specifically designed for prisoners. Prisoners who travel in such trains are crowded into caged compartments with little fresh air, no showers, and only limited access to food or a toilet.
The transfers can take days, weeks, or even months as the trains stop and convicts spend time in transit prisons.
"Russian authorities must immediately reveal Andrei Pivovarov's whereabouts, and immediately and without any conditions release him. Also, it is necessary to reform the system of transportation of convicts in the country, making it correspond to the international standards of human rights," Natalya Zvyagina, director of the Amnesty International in Russia, said in the statement.
The "undesirable organizations" law, adopted in 2015, was part of a series of regulations pushed by the Kremlin that squeezed many nonprofit and nongovernmental organizations that received funding from foreign sources -- mainly from Europe and the United States.