Foreign Ministry criticises Pussy Riot sentencing

Prague, Aug 17 (CTK) - The Czech Foreign Ministry has said it is deeply embarrassed about the two-year prison sentence a Moscow court Friday gave to the members of the Russian punk band Pussy Riot for staging a protest against President Vladimir Putin in an Orthodox church in Moscow in February.

Foreign Minister Karel Schwarzenberg said the verdict is very sad.

"To tell te truth, I cannot imagine any other European country where such a deed - that I can maximally qualify as a riot - would be punished as if a crime were committed," he told CTK.

Schwarzenberg said it is true the three women's behaviour was unusual, "but entirely within the democratic protest."

He said he found no denigration of religion in the text that the girls sang.

"It is rather a prayer that I can imagine many young people would sing in a similar form in this country," he said.

Shadow foreign minister Lubomir Zaoralek (opposition Social Democrats, CSSD) also said the verdict is inappropriate.

The Czech branch of Amnesty International labelled the three young women prisoners of conscience.

Czech Russian scholar Tomas Glanc said the trial was stage-managed.

Participants in a demonstration in Prague's Wenceslas Square signed a letter addressed to the Russian ambassador to the Czech Republic, calling for the three activists' to be immediately released.

"The deeds with which they have been charged fall under the protection of freedom of conviction and peaceful assembly," the letter reads.

The Czech Foreign Ministry said in its statement that a deed that caused neither health nor property damage was very strictly punished.

"The ministry points not only to the length of the prison sentence, but also to that the artists were held in custody for more than five months," the statement says.

Zaoralek told CTK that the act could be judged as a disturbance and that the punishment was to be suspended.

"I would be able to comprehend a suspended sentence for a disturbance, they probably may have annoyed someone," he said.

Zaoralek said the issue must be subject of "mutual debate with Russian partners."

"I hope we can afford to tell the country to the east from us that we, Central Europeans, consider this too strong," Zaoralek said.

TI said it considers the three activists prisoners of consciences who were convicted of a mere peaceful expression of their conviction.

Glanc, a guest professor at Slavic Studies Institute of Humboldt University in Berlin, said he considers the verdict a logic continuation of the stage-managed trial in which the whole defence was ignored.

"The course of the individual stages of the trial proves that the very court proceedings were merely formal and that the results of the particular acts were decided beforehand," Glanc told CTK.

He said the rhetoric of the verdict, in which Orthodoxy is placed on the same level as the civic code is also shocking.

Bishop Vaclav Maly said the whole thing is a shame. He said "the girls have apologised and they should be maximally fined...I would have expected the Moscow patriarch to say: Free the girls," Maly said.

He said much more serious cases of silencing or persecuting artists or bloggers in Russia remain in the shadow of this trial.

Representatives of other churches in the Czech Republic have expressed support to the girls in an open letter addressed to Patriarch Kirill.

The verdict has also been denounced by many Czech artists.

Pussy Riot sang in the Moscow Christ the Saviour Cathedral the punk prayer asking the Virgin Mary to rid Russia of Putin before the presidential election in February.

They protested this way against Kirill's calls for people to vote for Putin, the election favourite.

They were accused of rioting motivated by religious intolerance. The activists refused to plead guilty, but they apologised to the believers.