INSUBCONTINENT EXCLUSIVE:
A Russian court on Tuesday sentenced an activist for police labor rights to five years in prison for extortion and distribution of
pornography.Arrested in May 2020, former policeman Vladimir Vorontsov has been in detention for nearly three years.Vorontsov, who quit the
Moscow police force in 2017 after 13 years, has denied any wrongdoing.Moscow's Lyublinsky district court on Tuesday found him guilty of
extortion, distribution of pornography and insulting a representative of the authorities, said OVD-Info, a human rights monitor tracking
political persecution.He was also stripped of his police rank of major and banned from administering blogs for 10 years.Supporters say the
real reason for Vorontsov's punishment was his Police Ombudsman project, a series of social media accounts dedicated to protecting police
chief Kremlin critic Alexei Navalny's team urged police officers to keep up the pressure.Vorontsov's case at the time sparked a rare public
outcry among police, a key pillar of President Vladimir Putin's rule.Vorontsov was detained in a spectacular fashion.During an early-morning
raid, two commando teams stormed the former policeman's top-floor apartment in southeast Moscow, one abseiling down the high-rise while the
other broke down the door.During a five-hour search, investigators even combed through their four-year-old's toys, socks and underwear,
popular, attracting more than half a million followers.It has exposed allegations of corruption within law enforcement and denounced
pressure on officers to fulfil quotas for fines and arrests.It has also drawn attention to long working hours and suicides in the police
750,000-strong police force openly challenged the authorities over Vorontsov's treatment but also on the functioning and methods of the
that dozens of police commit suicide every year, Kremlin critics say.Supporters believe that Vorontsov has made enemies in the upper
echelons of the police force and several senior officers have lost their jobs due to his activism.
