s crew that will allow them to leave the country after dropping criminal charges against them over a protest outside an Arctic oil rig. Greenpeace said on Thursday that other foreign members of the crew were expected to get their exit visas soon. The 30 people were arrested in September after a protest outside a Russian oil rig and spent two months in jail before they were granted bail in November....
s time to go home, it's time to get back to Wales, and I just got one big step closer." He said the group took peaceful action and he remained proud of his actions. The 28 activists and two journalists were charged with piracy, later reduced to hooliganism, after Russian authorities boarded their ship. After they were held in St Petersburg for months, initially in prison and then on bail, they were...
s main cathedral, the women of Pussy Riot are no less defiant. Maria Alyokhina and Nadezhda Tolokonnikova have walked free from prison , and pledged to devote their energies to changing the political system in Russia and improving conditions inside its prisons. Bareheaded despite the -25C cold, Tolokonnikova walked out of prison in the eastern city of Krasnoyarsk, flashing a victory sign to reporters...
Russian environmental activist, Yevgeny Vitishko, reported on environmental fallout from construction for 2014 Winter Olympics A prominent Russian environmental activist who has reported on the environmental fallout from construction for the 2014 Sochi Winter Games has been sentenced to three years in prison. Yevgeny Vitishko and another activist were found guilty of deliberate destruction of property...
lobby When Chico Mendes was gunned down in the Amazon, the two policemen who were supposed to protect him were playing dominoes at his kitchen table. It was 22 December 1988. The officers had been sent to the union activist's small wooden home in Xapuri after he received death threats from landowners, who were enraged by his campaign to prevent forest clearance. But the police dropped their guard...
s special style is to say unreasonable and sometimes unbelievable things in a reasonable way If there is a more irritating sight on the international stage than Vladimir Putin's vulpine visage when he is feeling pleased with himself, it is hard to think of what it would be. His usually immobile features relax sufficiently to betray an immense self-satisfaction as he swings with aplomb into his usual...
t win their support for shale gas, says company facing protests at drilling sites Payments of almost £1bn to people living near shale gas wells will not be sufficient to win public backing for fracking on their own, according to the boss of one of the UK's nascent shale gas companies. Andrew Austin, the chief executive officer of IGas, whose Salford oil drilling site has been subject to several weeks...
incarceration would not deter Greenpeace from campaigning on Arctic drilling. "Going to the Arctic is not going to change. That's certain. But we haven't thought 'what next'. We haven't thought through whether we should confront Gazprom or Russia again," Sauven said. "There is a sense of fantastic relief at the Russian parliamentary amnesty. [But] we know we have not won. We haven't stopped oil companies...
Greenpeace employee relieved but defiant after Russia grants amnesty to protesters and jailed members of punk band Pussy Riot ...
s post-2012 crackdown on human rights , the worst since the Soviet era. New Russian laws outlawing "gay propaganda" have created negative headlines from Stockholm to Seattle. And the arrest of 30 Greenpeace campaigners, after they boarded a Russian oil rig to draw attention to the plundering of the Arctic, has seen protests outside Russian embassies. The wide-ranging amnesty law passed by the Russian...
Our friend Howard Clark, who has died suddenly aged 63, was a radical pacifist and full-time peace activist, organiser and researcher. As a student at the University of East Anglia from 1968 to 1971, he co-founded the UEA peace group and was a well-known figure on campus, always carrying a bundle of Peace News to sell. Born in Bath into a Methodist family, Howard was educated at the city's Kingswood...
s president, Vladimir Putin, is timed to coincide with the 20th anniversary of Russia's constitution. It mainly concerns first-time offenders, minors and women with small children. An amendment on Wednesday extended the amnesty to suspects in cases of hooliganism, which includes the Arctic 30, who were arrested aboard the Greenpeace ship Arctic Sunrise in September. They were bailed by courts in St...