Russian opposition politician Alexei Navalny is calling for a boycott of the country’s next presidential ballot after election officials barred him from running.

Russia’s Central Election Commission (CEC) voted Monday to bar Navalny from running in the March 2018 presidential election because of his conviction on criminal charges that the anti-corruption blogger and his followers say were politically motivated.

The commission’s decision came a day after Navalny declared he had collected the required number of endorsements nationwide to become a presidential candidate.

Following Monday’s CEC decision, Navalny released a video calling on his supporters to boycott the presidential vote.

“We understood that this [the CEC decision] was possible, and we have a clear and precise plan… We are declaring a ‘voters’ strike’, in as much as the procedure in which we are being urged to participate is not an election,” he said.

Navalny said his team would now campaign against participating in the presidential election, saying to cast a ballot would be “to vote for deception and corruption.”

President Vladimir Putin announced earlier this month that he will run in the March 18 election, and it is widely assumed he will win a fourth term as Russian head of state
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Spain’s King Felipe directed his Christmas message Sunday to the separatist-minded region of Catalonia and what he says is the need to avoid confrontation.

The king urged regional leaders to help “Catalonia’s society, diverse and plural as it is, to recover its serenity, stability, and mutual respect in such a way as to ensure that ideas don’t divide or separate families and friends.”

Looking back on a “difficult” year for Spain, he reminded Catalan leaders and the newly-elected parliament to “face the problems that affect all Catalans, respecting their diversity and thinking responsibly in the common good.”

In an October speech, the king condemned what he called the “unacceptable disloyalty” of Catalan separatists.

Pro-independence lawmakers dominate the Catalan parliament after Thursday’s election.

Spanish Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy disbanded the previous parliament after Catalonia illegally held an independence referendum, leading to violence and nationwide chaos.

Rajoy was hoping Catalan voters would elect a new parliament that favors remaining united with Spain instead of looking to secede.

Catalonia President Carles Puigdemont fled to exile in Belgium after the October referendum. He has offered to hold talks with Rajoy, but will not return to Spain where he faces arrest.

Rajoy has so far refused to meet with Puigdemont, saying he wants to wait until the Catalan parliament elects its next regional president.

Catalonia, in northeast Spain, and its capital Barcelona are major tourist magnets. It has his own language and distinct culture. But the separatist crisis has hurt tourism and the regional economy.

Catalan separatists say the region is a powerful economic engine that drives Spain and have demanded more autonomy.

Those who want to stay united with Spain are afraid the region will sink into an economic abyss without the central government, its ties to the European Union, and its numerous existing bilateral relations.
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Outside the doors to the Moscow courthouse, the crowd of supporters, and reporters, swelled into the hundreds. Inside, one of Russia’s most famous theater directors was on trial for embezzlement. Just meters away, on a street corner, a young woman stood with a small sign: “Return our artist to us.”

Such are the times in Russia, where art – theater, literature, painting, music, film – has again become a political battleground, where left and right fight over values and culture with increasing intensity.

In President Vladimir Putin’s current term alone, the country’s cultural space has already been buffeted by an artist who nailed his scrotum to Red Square and the jailing of masked musicians whose collective sobriquet, Pussy Riot, became a byword for protest.

But for many observers, the fervor of debate and clashes in the past year over what constitutes art has been symptomatic of creeping authoritarianism under Putin and the conservative, nationalist, and sometimes religious agenda that may keep him in the Kremlin longer than any leader since Stalin.

A Russian film about the last tsar and his Polish mistress attracted angry protests and threats against cinema owners. An acclaimed director branded himself a “coward” and denounced his own TV spy series as “defending the regime.” And the prolific artistic director of Moscow’s avant-garde Gogol Center was charged with financial crimes after clashing publicly with Russia’s culture minister.

Under Putin, artists have gone from being “neutral” outsiders to being pulled into the country’s cultural struggles, says Marat Guelman, an influential Moscow gallery owner who once clashed with cultural authorities over artwork that satirized the 2014 Sochi Winter Olympics.

“Now it’s not just enough to be for Putin,” Guelman says. “We’ve arrived at the moment in time when the administration doesn’t just want loyalty, not just those who have joined Putin. They want people who are united in their thinking with the administration. They want to work people who say: ‘We are patriots. We are for isolation. My creative work is against America, against liberals.'”

Keeping Things ‘Traditional’

As recently as a month before his August arrest, the Gogol Center’s Kirill Serebrennikov had clashed with outspoken Culture Minister Vladimir Medinsky over a new ballet based on the life of famed Soviet dancer Rudolph Nureyev.

Serebrennikov’s production, to be staged at the Bolshoi Theater, alluded to Nureyev’s sexual orientation, and the Bolshoi director later announced a postponement. Though no official reason was given, Medinsky reportedly disapproved of the homosexual references in an echo of a controversial 2013 law criminalizing the propaganda of “nontraditional sexual relationships” to minors.

Serebrennikov’s detention on accusations of embezzling state funds for another project stunned Russia’s artistic community. Many saw Serebrennikov’s domestic and international accolades as sources of pride for the country’s rich artistic traditions.

It was Serebrennikov’s first appearance in court that drew hundreds to the Moscow street, many carrying signs and photographs and jeering the proceedings.

Before his detention, Serebrennikov was outspoken in his condemnation of the 2013 law and the detention of Ukrainian filmmaker Oleh Sentsov for allegedly planning terrorist acts in Crimea after its occupation by Russia in 2014. Serebrennikov was also vocal in his support of Pussy Riot, the performance-art group whose members served prison time over a music video criticizing Putin and the Russian Orthodox Church that was filmed inside a Moscow cathedral.

Serebrennikov’s arrest may turn out to be a watershed moment, according to John Freedman, who has been the Moscow Times’ theater critic since the English-language paper’s founding in 1992.

Russia’s creative classes “realize that the state’s choice to go after art through the way it is funded is a danger to everyone who engages in art in Russia,” Freedman said in an e-mail to RFE/RL. “The laws are a mess. It is virtually impossible for a theater manager, for example, to keep his theater running without breaking laws. This has been true for years and even decades.”

Not Just For Art’s Sake

Unlike during the Soviet era, when nearly all artists had to work under official auspices, Russian artists and cultural figures had relatively free rein during the tumultuous presidency of Boris Yeltsin in the 1990s and, until recently, Putin’s tenure. Even critics acknowledge that writers, painters, sculptors, and musicians could largely publish, paint, build, and perform more or less what they were inspired to do.

Early in Putin’s presidency, however, the Kremlin moved to take over the country’s TV networks, foreshadowing limits on the medium for artistic expression. The economic boom of the 2000s gave government agencies – the Culture Ministry, above all – more money to hand out to artists.

In the meantime, a donor class of uber-wealthy, well-connected businessmen invested in artistic projects that helped showcase the country’s talent. Moscow’s Garage Museum of Contemporary Art, founded by Dasha Zhukova and her billionaire ex-husband, gained renown in international circles for promoting pioneering artists in an avant-garde venue.

Established artists, such as conductor Valery Gergiyev, the venerated artistic director of St. Petersburg’s Mariinsky Theater, were lavished with state funds and support. Last year, Gergiyev’s orchestra was flown to the Syrian ruins of Palmyra to perform a live televised concert in celebration of Russian forces’ military successes there.

But other artists were openly scornful of perceived rigidity in the Putin era and groups like the notorious street-art group Voina embraced political protest as a form of performance art. Acts were already testing the limits of official tolerance, in particular with respect to the powerful Russian Orthodox Church.

Putin’s return to the presidency in 2012, after four years as prime minister for his protege Dmitry Medvedev, was a tipping point for art and politics, Guelman says.

On the heels of major street protests following contentious parliamentary elections and with Putin poised to retake the Kremlin, Pussy Riot in February 2012 shot its now-famous video that sparked a landmark trial and landed three of its members in custody – two for prison terms.

One year later, with the Kremlin-backed United Russia party dominant, lawmakers passed the law on gay “propaganda” and another law that indirectly targeted some forms of artistic expression. The other, on “offending believers,” made it a criminal offense to insult individuals’ religious sensibilities.

Such legislation prompted a backlash not only within Russia’s lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) and artistic communities but also in the West, where some leaders boycotted the Sochi Winter Olympics in 2014.

‘Catalyzing’ Effect

Guelman was one of many artists who mocked the Sochi Olympics, which were the costliest in history and dogged by accusations of corruption. Guelman was fired in the run-up to the games after lampooning their preparations in an exhibition at a museum in the Urals city of Perm.

Guelman, who now spends most of his time abroad, was also an outspoken supporter of Pussy Riot. He says their cathedral performance came at a moment when the country had experienced a burst of liberal optimism under Medvedev and was wary of compromise with the government.

Pussy Riot changed that, he says. “They created something in direct contradiction to Putin.”

“You also have to understand what happened at that moment in time. It was a moment when apathy, among our circles, was great – that there was nothing to be done: ‘Putin is bad, but he’s not going anywhere, and we can’t do anything about it,'” Guelman explains. “And yet these girls managed to do something.” 

Pussy Riot, in turn, inspired one of Russia’s most shocking performance artists. Pyotr Pavlensky made his own name sewing his mouth shut to draw attention to Pussy Riot’s plight, nailing his scrotum to the cobblestones outside the Kremlin to protest public indifference, and otherwise challenging the government and Russian society.

“The authorities themselves catalyzed this with their punitive action against the group Pussy Riot,” Pavlensky told RFE/RL’s Russian Service in 2016. Earlier this year, he and his partner fled Russia and sought political asylum in France.

Mark Teeter, a Moscow-based Russian-language professor and longtime TV critic for the Moscow Times, says artists of an earlier generation who have remained resolute in their contempt for the authorities include Yury Shevchuk, front man for the rock band DDT.

“Various artists have refused to be intimidated, and shown it by more conventional means than nailing their scrotums to something downtown,” Teeter says. “Rock artists of my generation have kept on doing what they do with undisguised contempt for” Putin.

While Putin has weighed in periodically on far-reaching cultural legislation — he endorsed the gay “propaganda” law and called Pussy Riot “talented girls” — it’s Medinsky who has led the charge against art deemed inappropriate.

The Culture Ministry is among the largest sources of funding for artistic projects, so its ability to approve or influence directors, gallery owners, or performers is unmatched. (The embezzlement charges against Serebrennikov stem from a project involving a Shakespeare play that received state money.)

At least one prominent director has openly lamented a willingness — his own and others’ — to sacrifice artistry in the service of the Kremlin. After his TV series Sleepers debuted, lionizing Russian security agents battling CIA sleeper cells, director Yury Bykov apologized, saying he had “betrayed” his fans by “defending the regime.” The series was funded by the Culture Ministry and produced by Fyodor Bondarchuk, a filmmaker who is also on United Russia’s top council.

In the meantime, religious and nationalist groups have also stepped into the culture wars, taking on the feature film Matilda, which depicts a romantic affair of Tsar Nicholas II, who has been canonized by the Russian Orthodox Church. One group calling itself Christian State-Holy Rus threatened this year to burn down cinemas if they showed the film, and director Aleksei Uchitel’s office in St. Petersburg was hit with Molotov cocktails.

Three years before he ended up in a Moscow jail cell, Serebrennikov gave an interview to online culture website Colta.ru in which he was blunt about his country’s future.

Russia “is an unbelievably dark and ignorant country,” he warned, “and it’s only getting darker.”
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The number of migrants crossing the Mediterranean to Europe continued to fall last month, and the European Union says its policies to ease the crisis are working. 

On the so-called central Mediterranean route from North Africa, arrivals were down by a third. And Europe claimed success in slowing the arrival of migrants. 

But Amnesty International claims the bloc’s collaboration with Libyan groups involved in the detention of migrants makes it complicit in gross human rights abuses.

Maria Serrano of Amnesty International says this has come at a terrible human cost.

“Europe has decided to cooperate with Libyan authorities, knowing the kind of torture, abuses, detention that migrants and refugees are exposed to in Libya,” she said.

​Apparent slave market

In November video emerged apparently showing migrants being sold at a slave market in Libya, prompting international outrage and calls for urgent action from the Donald Tusk, president of the European Council.

“Let me repeat my call to impose U.N. sanctions on human smugglers and traffickers,” he said.

European countries are providing tens of millions of dollars and training to the Libyan coast guard and armed groups under the control of the Tripoli unity government. 

That makes Europe complicit in the abuse, says Amnesty’s Serrano.

“They are sent to official detention centers, then militias and other armed groups and Libyan officials control these centers. So, this is a source of money for them. Migrants are extorted, they are forced to call their families, and their families are listening to the awful abuses they suffer, so they receive beatings, they are tortured, women are raped.”

The European Union has funded emergency repatriation flights to take migrants stranded in Libya back to their home countries. But there appears to be little political willingness to soften Europe’s stance.

EU leaders have trumpeted the falling migrant numbers as a way of countering anti-migrant populist forces, says political analyst Leopold Traugott of Open Europe.

“The repercussions of the recent influx in 2016 and 2015 are still felt in most European countries,” he said. “So, until the EU decides and implements a new reform of its migration policies and is able to deliver sustainable solutions, the migrant crisis will still be an issue for European countries.”

In 2015, Germany took in more than a million migrants. The backlash boosted support for the far right and cost Chancellor Angela Merkel votes at the September election.

But supporters say her ultimate victory is proof that Germany, and Europe, can successfully integrate the migrants.

Nevertheless, the European Union appears determined to close the routes across the Mediterranean. Despite the risk of torture, abuse and drowning, more than 160,000 migrants made the journey in 2017.
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