BANGKOK (AP) — A court in Myanmar sentenced a photojournalist for an underground news agency to 20 years in prison with hard labor for his coverage of a deadly May cyclone’s aftermath, the media organization said Wednesday.

The sentence given Sai Zaw Thaike, a photographer for the independent online news service Myanmar Now, appeared to be the most severe for any journalist detained since the military overthrew the elected government of Aung San Suu Kyi in February 2021.

The press freedom group Reporters Without Borders said in April that Myanmar is the world’s second- biggest jailer of journalists, behind only China. The country ranks near the bottom of the group’s 2023 World Press Freedom Index, placing 176th out of 180 countries.

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Nobel Peace Prize laureate Oleksandra Matviichuk has called for the swift creation of a special tribunal to try Vladimir Putin and his associates for the crime of aggression, arguing that it could have “a cooling effect” on atrocities committed by the Kremlin’s invading forces.

Oleksandra Matviichuk, the head of the Centre for Civil Liberties, also said a speedy start to war crimes trials against the Russian president and soldiers could save people’s lives by deterring Russian forces from committing further crimes.

Starting legal proceedings could have “a cooling effect” on the brutality of human rights violations that Russian troops were committing daily in Ukraine , she told the Guardian in an interview.

Some troops, perhaps not all, would realise that Putin’s authoritarian regime had an end date, Matviichuk said, if they knew they would be held to account. The possibility of justice would help them realise “I will not be able to hide under abstract Putin and maybe I will have to be responsible for every thing which I commit by my own hands”, she said.

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Myanmar’s military has imported arms worth at least $1bn since seizing power in February 2021, despite “overwhelming evidence of its responsibility for atrocity crimes”, a United Nations expert has said.

Most of the weapons came from Russia, China and companies in Singapore, Tom Andrews, the UN Special Rapporteur on Human Rights in Myanmar said in a report [PDF] released on Wednesday in New York.

The exports cover weapons, dual-use technology and materials used to manufacture weapons exported from the day of the coup on February 1, 2021, to December 2022.

“These weapons, and the materials to manufacture more of them, have continued to flow uninterrupted to the Myanmar military despite overwhelming evidence of its responsibility for atrocity crimes,” said the report. It identified more than 12,500 unique purchases or recorded shipments directly to the Myanmar military or known Myanmar arms dealers working on the military’s behalf.

“The diversity and volume of goods provided to the Myanmar military since the coup is staggering,” it added, saying the military had taken delivery of weapons and equipment from fighter jets to drones, communications equipment and components for navy ships.

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photo: Aung Shine Oo/AP Photo

TEHRAN, Iran – You see it as soon as you land at the airport: posters telling women to keep their headscarves on. They’re everywhere in Iran; in malls, restaurants, billboards above main highways, and even rest stops in between cities. The hijab remains the official law in Iran.

But these days, all around the country, many women are going about their business hair uncovered. It’s a vivid reminder of the public uproar and anti-government protests that erupted after Mahsa Amini, a 22-year-old Kurdish woman, was killed in police custody in September. She was allegedly arrested for improper wear of her headscarf.

The government brutally cracked down on those protests, killing hundreds of people and jailing thousands, according to rights groups.

What began as anger at the hijab law grew into a bigger movement as Iranians said they were fed up with the regime’s corruption, economic mismanagement and oppression of its citizens. Now, a visible minority of women in Iran are refusing to wear headscarves, in defiant protest against the government and all of its policies.

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A court in Belarus has sentenced Nobel Peace Prize winner Ales Bialiatski to 10 years in prison.

He was convicted of smuggling and financing “actions grossly violating public order”, the Viasna human rights group said.

Supporters of Mr Bialiatski, 60, say the authoritarian regime of Belarusian leader Alexander Lukashenko is trying to silence him.

He was arrested in 2021 following massive street protests over widely disputed elections the previous year, and accused of smuggling cash into Belarus to fund opposition activity.

Demonstrators were met with police brutality and Lukashenko critics were regularly arrested and jailed during the demonstrations, which started in 2020.

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On the one-year anniversary of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, a conflict that has displaced millions of Ukrainians and claimed the lives of thousands of civilians, the Utah Valley University (UVU) Center for Constitutional Studies (CCS) hosted Russian journalist and Nobel Peace Prize recipient Dmitry Muratov in a question-answer forum with UVU President Astrid S. Tuminez in the Clarke Building auditorium.

In the course of his remarks, Muratov, with the aid of a translator, spoke on Novaya Gazeta, a pro-democracy newspaper he co-founded; the murder of Russian journalists; the values of a free press; propaganda, dictatorship and corruption; and the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

“I am very concerned when I hear words about my own courage and courage of my colleagues,” he began. “I think that the biggest courage of the day is the courage of those people in Ukraine or those children who are suffering, and that is the reality of today.”

Muratov was awarded the 2021 Nobel Peace Prize with Novaya Gazeta  co-founder Maria Ressa. He chose to auction his award medal for $103.5 million, which he then donated to UNICEF for the benefit of refugees from Ukraine.

“It’s too early to applaud,” he said. “These kind of auctions have to go on constantly because there is a great need, and we all have something we can share to help ease the suffering in Ukraine. This should be a chain of good deeds.”

On the 2006 murder of Russian journalist Anna Politkovskaya, a columnist for Novaya Gazeta, Muratov spoke on authoritarian governments’ need for silence — and the ultimate price for that silence.

“The foundation of each dictatorship is corruption,” he said. “Corruption needs to cancel democracy so the government will not be changeable. If a government isn’t changeable, that leads to dictatorship, and dictatorship always leads to war. A free media is really a requirement for no war, and free media was destroyed. Three hundred independent media organizations have been closed. Five hundred journalists have been declared as enemies of the state.”

When President Tuminez asked if he was concerned for his own safety, Muratov said that he would be saying the same things he would be saying now if he were in Moscow.

“I don’t have a special version of my speech for export,” Muratov said. “In Moscow, we cannot talk openly about the events in Ukraine. You cannot name these events ‘the war.’”

In spite of all the challenges facing the world today, Muratov said he sees hope in younger generations.

“My main hope is in the new generation, which wants to live, which wants education,” he said. “I believe that people have compassion, and they’re not going to say, ‘This war is not in our continent, it’s not our war.’  They will see it differently. I believe an anti-war movement will force politicians to strive for peace.”

At the close of his remarks, Muratov strongly advised listeners to study propaganda and its effects on manipulating people.

“Propaganda is like radiation. It affects everyone and you need to know how to deal with it,” he said.

Muratov co-founded Novaya Gazetain 1991; the publication became a vocal advocate for free expression and democracy in Russia. In 2022, the Russian agency for censoring mass media canceled Novaya Gazeta’s media license, making it no longer available in Russia.

Utah Valley University website

Belarus has handed long jail terms to senior staff at the country’s largest independent news site, which was forced to close after historic demonstrations against strongman Alexander Lukashenko over two years ago.

The verdicts are the latest in a crackdown on journalists, opposition figures and activists who challenged Lukashenko’s claim that he won a sixth presidential term in 2020.

A court in Minsk on Friday sentenced the editor-in-chief of the Tut.by portal, Marina Zolotova, 45, and general director Lyudmila Chekina, 54, to 12 years each behind bars.

The women faced a raft of charges including tax evasion – which critics say is regularly used as a pretext to silence dissent – and “incitement to hatred”.

Exiled opposition leader Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya, who Lukashenko critics say won the presidential election, condemned the long jail terms.

Read it at The Guardian