Russian President Dmitry Medvedev has signed a decree excluding prominent human rights activist Irina Yasina and journalist Svetlana Sorokina from the Kremlin council on human rights.
The presidential decree, signed on March 5, was published on the government website on Sunday.
In December last year, amid mass street protest against alleged fraud in Russia’s parliamentary elections, Yasina and Sorokina published a statement on their blogs saying they were leaving the council over what they described as “falsifications” during the December 4 vote and “brutal reprisal” against pro-democracy protesters.
The statement came shortly after police dispersed protest rallies in central Moscow on Decemeber 5 and 6, arresting hundreds of people protesting against what they described as multiple cases of ballot stuffing and other fraud in favor of Prime Minister Vladimir Putin’s United Russia party in the State Duma elections. According to official vote returns, the party won almost half of the seats in the Duma.
Later in the month, tens of thousands of people took to the streets in Moscow, St. Petersburg and other cities across Russia to protest against the alleged vote fraud. Most of those rallies, including two major demonstrations in central Moscow, were sanctioned by the authorities and were peaceful.
