The European Court of Human Rights has ruled that Russia must pay a record compensation to a man with mental disabilities who has been illegally detained. This is a great victory for us and our partner Mental Disability Advocacy Center.

A year after Belarus imposed a law regulating mass media the legal basis for free media to act in Belarus is decisively weakened. The positive changes in the media field were neither systematic nor definitive.

In January 2010 the human rights organization Viasna and the Belarusian Helsinki Committee launched the campaign “Human rights defenders against death penalty.” The campaign aims to disseminate objective information and in the long term work for abolition of the death penalty.