Who is Grigory Melkonyants? Russian election watchdog leader sentenced to five years in prison

A Moscow court on Wednesday sentenced Grigory Melkonyants , co-chair of the independent election monitoring group Golos , to five years in prison on charges of organizing the activities of an “undesirable” organization, a charge widely condemned by human rights advocates as politically motivated.

Melkonyants, who was arrested in August 2023, has pleaded innocent throughout his trial. Prosecutors accused him of continuing cooperation with the Montenegro-based European Network of Election Monitoring Organizations ( ENEMO ), which was designated “undesirable” by Russian authorities in 2021.

Judge Evgeniya Nikolaeva of Moscow’s Basmanny District Court found Melkonyants guilty of working with ENEMO and imposed additional restrictions beyond the prison sentence. According to exiled independent news outlet Mediazona, the court also barred Melkonyants from engaging in any “public activity” for nine years following his release.

The case is part of a broader campaign against political critics that the Kremlin has intensified since the invasion of Ukraine in 2022. Melkonyants and Golos have both rejected the charges as politically driven.

Golos, which has documented election violations across Russia since its founding in 2000, has long been targeted by authorities. It was labeled a “foreign agent” in 2013, a designation carrying stigma and increased scrutiny, and was dissolved as a non-governmental organization by the Justice Ministry in 2016. The group has continued to operate informally as an and was added in 2021 to a registry for unregistered “foreign agents.”

While Golos itself has not been declared “undesirable,” prosecutors argued that its past association with ENEMO, of which it was a member as an NGO before its liquidation, provided grounds for Melkonyants’s prosecution.

In recent years, Russian authorities have ramped up efforts to silence independent voices. Numerous media outlets and human rights organizations have been shut down, branded as “foreign agents,” or outlawed as “undesirable,” while hundreds of activists, journalists, and opposition figures face criminal prosecution.

Melkonyants’s sentencing has drawn sharp criticism from international observers, who see it as further evidence of Russia’s erosion of democratic norms and civil liberties.