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Russian Association Golos was awarded the Andrei Sakharov Freedom Award 2012 for its outstanding efforts to promote democratic values through free and fair elections in Russia, Secretary General Bjørn Engesland says in a statement today.

The post-revolutionary Tunisian government has already been accused of clamping down on reporters. The ones recently charged include two artists whose crime is creating sculptures that the authorities consider harmful to public order and good morals. Nadia Jelassi’s work is of a veiled woman surrounded by rocks, suggesting she is being stoned, while Mohamed Ben Slama’s work is of a child with ants streaming from a schoolbag that spell out “God”.

ARTICLE 19 calls on the Ukrainian government to publicly condemn the killing of environmental information activist, Volodymyr Honcharenko, as a crime against freedom of expression and ensure that those responsible are brought to justice via an effective, independent and speedy process. Volodymyr campaigned for environmental information in Ukraine and died in August.

A group of four men attacked the opposition journalist, Ularbek Baytalak, on the outskirts of Astana, where he was left to die. The journalist works for two opposition newspapers, Dat and Tortinshi bilik, and takes a critical stance towards the current government. The attack on Baytalak comes a few months after fellow opposition journalist Lukpan Akhmendyarov survived being shot and stabbed outside his apartment in April 2012.

In August 2001, the Ugandan army forcefully evicted more than 2000 people from their land in the Mubende district to make way for a vast coffee plantation operated by Kaweri Coffee Plantation Ltd., a subsidiary of the Hamburg-based Neumann Kaffee Gruppe. To this day, the evictees continue to suffer from the loss of their land.

Israeli court has ruled in a civil case that the Israel army was not at fault in the bulldozer death of American pro-Palestinian activist Rachel Corrie nearly 10 years ago. Corrie was 23 years old when she went to the town of Rafah in the Gaza Strip as part of a group of activists of the International Solidarity Movement (ISM).

With the release of its concluding observations addressed to Mexico, the UN Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW) expresses concern about harmful cultural practices and violence directed at indigenous rural women, as well as their lack of access to land, property and justice, and asks for better implementation of women’s rights in the country.

Ecuador’s president has invited UK government to talks over the fate of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange on the condition that Britain guarantee it will not enter the diplomatic mission in London where Assange has sought shelter. Computer hacker Assange, whom Swedish prosecutors want to question over accusations of rape and sexual assault, jumped bail and fled to the Ecuadorian embassy nine weeks ago.

An Indonesian group calling itself “People’s Care for Rohingya” has been protesting in front of the Myanmar’s embassy in the capital Jakarta against the violence and discrimination against the Muslim Rohingya minority in Myanmar.