Source: HRO.org 

Tver Region Court has refused to consider the cassation appeal against the conviction of local blogger Andrei Bubeev, who was sentenced to two years and three months in a prison colony after being charged with reposting extremist material on the Internet, reports OVD-Info, citing the lawyer Svetlana Sidorkina who is representing Bubeev. According to Sidorkina, the regional court’s decision not to transfer the appeal to the appeals court is dated 27 February.

Moreover, as Bubeev’s wife, Anastasia, wrote in her blog on the Open Russia website, a threatening letter sent to Tver Region Court was from a group allegedly supporting Andrei Bubeev that Anastasia says does not exist.

Bubeev was prosecuted for a second time after the sentence had already been passed in a first trial. He was charged with inciting extremism and separatism after publishing an article by the convicted journalist Boris Stomakhin and a scathing text to accompany it. Bubeev’s sentence of two years and three months is the combined term deriving from the two cases.

At the end of December 2016, Bubeev was transferred from a minimum security prison colony to a general regime prison colony after being accused of allegedly violating a number of rules in the minimum security prison colony.

Translated by Nicky Brown