A court in Baku on December 29 started preliminary hearings in a case against Azerbaijani activist Baxtiyar Haciyev, who has been in pretrial detention for more than a year.
Kazakh journalist Vladimir Severny, who was sentenced to seven years in prison earlier this month on extortion charges that he rejects, launched a hunger strike protesting his incarceration, his lawyer said on December 29.
Several former top officials at BelAZ one of the world's largest producers of dump trucks and the Minsk Tractor Works (MTZ) were handed lengthy prison terms on December 29 on bribery charges.
Russian media quoted law enforcement officials on December 29 as saying that a new probe on a charge of distributing "fake" information about the Russian armed forces has been launched against noted Russian lawyer and outspoken Kremlin critic Ilya Novikov, who lives in Ukraine.
Kazakh Foreign Ministry spokesman Aibek Smadiyarov said in a televised interview on December 29 that the Central Asian state's Security Council had decided to remove the Taliban group now ruling Afghanistan from its registry of terrorist organizations.