Week-ending 18 September 2020
On Friday, 18 September 2020, RFE/RL reported that prominent Russian activist Andrei Pivovarov has been detained at the exit of a Moscow detention center immediately after being released from serving a 14-day sentence for breaking protest laws. Pivovarov, the executive director of opposition group Open Russia, was taken to a Moscow police station on September 17 and will go before a court the following day on new charges of organizing or holding a public event without giving notice. “I suspect that immediately after the first detention they decided to issue another one,” Pivovarov wrote on his Telegram channel from a police van. On September 4, Pivovarov was sentenced to two weeks of detention over a Facebook post in July in which he sought to gather signatures in Moscow to petition against sweeping constitutional reforms passed later in the summer.
