Lawyers for Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich asked a United Nations body on Tuesday to urgently issue an opinion that he has been arbitrarily detained by Russia on espionage charges which are “patently false.”
The request to the U.N. Working Group on Arbitrary Detention says “Russia has failed to produce a shred of evidence in support of its accusations” since the 31-year-old journalist was arrested on March 29 on a reporting trip to the city of Yekaterinburg, almost 2,000 kilometers (1,200 miles) east of Moscow.
