An ethnic Russian woman has been sentenced to a year in prison for violating Estonia’s hate speech laws and for hooliganism, according to a June 6, 2003 report by the Baltic News Service. Ludmila Vikenteva was charged in June 2001 with distributing Kolovrat—the newspaper of the Estonia branch of the violent neo-Nazi group Russian National Unity, which an expert commission found incites ethnic hatred. She refused to respond to summons to come to a police station, and was subsequently arrested. Since September 2, 2002 she has been in pre-trial detention and has undergone numerous psychiatric tests.

In addition to her distribution of illegal literature, Ms. Vikenteva was sentenced for assaulting other market traders in her home city of Narva who confronted her after becoming upset at the content of the newspaper she was distributing.

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