A minister in Russia's Chechnya region has said it would be "remedial" for an openly gay woman to read the Koran, following beatings she accused her parents of orchestrating over her homosexuality.
It started with an invitation to a birthday party. And reportedly ended with repeated rape and beatings in a Bishkek brothel. This 16-year-old Kyrgyz girl’s story as a sex-trafficking victim is tragically familiar in Central Asia, though investigations do not always occur rapidly. After Current Time’s January 22, 2020 report about her story, however, Kyrgyz police detained three suspects in the case. Her identity has been concealed.
Navigating a Russian city in a wheelchair is incredibly difficult -- and the challenge is even greater in the middle of winter. One disability activist in the Siberian city of Tomsk says government projects intended to improve accessibility have largely failed to deliver on their promises.
Yulia Tsvetkova, an artist and activist in Russia's Far East, runs social-media pages focusing on women's art and LGBT issues. Her posts prompted officials to charge her with “propaganda of nontraditional sexual relations among minors” and distributing pornography, an offense for which she could face years in prison.
Flight To Freedom, a film by Current Time Digital video producer Mykola Nemchenko and RFE/RL multimedia coordinator Kateryna Oliynyk, shares the story of Czechoslovak cycling champion Robert Hutyra, who, in 1983, used a hot air balloon he had built to fly his family out from behind the Iron Curtain and into neighboring Austria.
After failing dozens of times to pass a law criminalizing domestic violence because of resistance from socially conservative Orthodox Christian forces, Russian activists and their allies in the State Duma are mounting yet another try. And, once again, they are meeting intense opposition from those who say the law would be a Western cultural imposition that would undermine the traditional Russian family.
The sister of a convicted Belarusian murderer has told Current Time of her heartbreak after the country's Supreme Court upheld Viktar Paulau's death sentence for the killing of two elderly women. Paulau is one of three men sentenced to death this year in Belarus, which is the only European country still using capital punishment.
Ten years ago, a little-known Russian lawyer working for a Western financial firm died in custody in Moscow. Sergei Magnitsky's name is now enshrined in human rights laws in the United States and around the world. Russian President Vladimir Putin is still fuming.
The head of a prison in the Russian region of Karelia denied charges that staff had abused inmates -- until a video surfaced this month showing a brutal beating. Several prisoners say one of the attackers seen in the footage is the prison chief himself.
Leonid was born in a small town in Russia's Far East, where his mother beat him for being gay. When he finished school, he left home and met Aleksandr, with whom he now campaigns for LGBT rights.
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