Lithuanian authorities have arbitrarily detained thousands of people in militarized centres, where they have been subjected to inhumane conditions, torture and other ill-treatment, Amnesty International said today. In a new report, the organization documents how refugees and migrants have been held for months on end in squalid, prison-like centres in Lithuania, where they are denied access to fair asylum procedures and subjected to other serious human rights violations in the hope that they will ‘voluntarily’ return to the countries they fled from.

Fresh evidence of harrowing violations, including sexual violence, against men, women and children intercepted while crossing the Mediterranean Sea and forcibly returned to detention centres in Libya, highlights the horrifying consequences of Europe’s ongoing cooperation with Libya on migration and border control, said Amnesty International in a report published today.

The arbitrary arrest and imprisonment of the Russian prominent anti-corruption campaigner and opposition figure Aleksei Navalny, and the concurrent arrests and detention on spurious charges of his colleagues from the Anti-Corruption Foundation and other civil society activists and peaceful protesters are the latest in the series of severe, brazen reprisals against all dissent in Russia.

Dear Permanent Representative,

A court in Moscow has sentenced opposition activist and Kremlin critic Aleksei Navalny to two years and eight months in a penal colony, amid a brutal crackdown on peaceful protests which saw at least 5,021 people detained on 31 January alone. The Simonovsky District Court granted a motion put forward by the Federal Penitentiary Service to replace Aleksei Navalny’s suspended sentence with jail time, and he will be held at a penal colony.

Dear High Representative,

Dear High Representative,

Welcome to Amnesty Write for Rights letter-writing and online action kit. In it, you’ll find everything you need to join Write for Write: our global letter-writing marathon and the world’s biggest human rights event.

The Burundian authorities must overturn human rights defender Germain Rukuki’s conviction and release him immediately and unconditionally, Amnesty International said today as it launched its annual letter-writing human rights campaign, Write for Rights.

Earlier this week, more than 278 lawmakers from across Europe and the United States sent public letters to Egyptian President, Abdel Fattah al-Sisi with a strong message denouncing the situation of prisoners of conscience in the country. In a show of mounting concern, 84 members of the European Parliament, 138 members of national parliaments across Europe, and 56 members of both chambers of the US Congress urged President al-Sisi to halt the unjust imprisonment of human rights defenders, journalists, lawyers and political activists in Egypt, who have been imprisoned solely for exercising their human rights.

Following a majority court ruling to convict Taner Kılıç for ‘membership of the Fethullah Gülen terrorist organization’ and to convict Özlem Dalkıran, İdil Eser and Günal Kurşun for ‘assisting the Fethullah Gülenterrorist organization’, Andrew Gardner, Amnesty International’s Turkey researcher who observed the hearing said:

People’s rights are being violated by governments in Europe and Central Asia, who are cracking down on protests and seeking to erode the independence of the judiciary to avoid accountability, Amnesty International said today as it published its annual review of human rights in the region.