Pro-Russian Moldova governor gets jail term over alleged illegal financing
Evghenia Gutul, a fierce critic of Moldova's EU-leaning government, has been governor of the Gagauzia region since 2023.
In recent years she has faced accusations of fraudulent management of electoral funds, illegal financing and false statements related to her election.
A Chisinau court on Tuesday convicted Gutul over her involvement in illegally financing the former Shor party set up by the fugitive businessman Ilan Shor, which was subsequently banned.
Prosecutors accuse Gutul of transporting undeclared funds from Russia to Moldova between 2019 and 2022 as secretary of the Shor party.
Gutul has denied any wrongdoing, and her lawyer Sergiu Moraru has vowed to appeal a ruling he called "a public execution".
In a post on Telegram, Gutul denounced the court's decision as a "political reprisal", saying it was "an attempt to intimidate the residents of Gagauzia who have the courage to vote against the ruling party's wishes".
Dozens of her supporters shouted "Shame" and "Down with (Moldovan President) Maia Sandu" when Gutul was escorted to a police van.
Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov called Gutul's sentencing "a politically motivated decision" ahead of parliamentary elections in September.
"The opposition is being squeezed in every possible way in Moldova," he said.
Gutul, 38, has made several trips to Moscow to meet with Russian President Vladimir Putin since being elected governor of Gagauzia with the support from Shor.
When she was detained at Chisinau airport in March, she sent a public letter to Putin asking him to help pressure the Moldovan authorities to release her.
Shor, who was convicted in absentia for fraud, took refuge in Russia. Moldovan authorities accused him of funnelling tens of millions of dollars into the country in 2024 in a bid to sway voters.
The autonomous Gagauzia region is in southern Moldova, and most of its 135,000 inhabitants mainly speak Russian despite their native language being closer to Turkish.
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Netchoice (2024) three Republican justices — Chief Justice John Roberts and Justices Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett — joined the Court's three Democrats in rejecting a Texas law that attempted to take control of content moderation at major social media sites like Facebook or YouTube. According to Texas Gov. Gregg Abbott, the purpose of this unconstitutional law was to force these companies to publish 'conservative viewpoints and ideas' that they did not want to publish. Last June, however, the Supreme Court, in Free Speech Coalition v. Paxton, upheld a Texas law requiring pornographic websites to verify that their users are over age 18, effectively overruling Ashcroft v. ACLU, a 2004 Supreme Court decision that struck down a virtually identical federal law. The Court's decision to uphold age-gating laws for porn sites is defensible. I wrote before oral arguments in Free Speech Coalition that some age-gating laws should be allowed, though I also said that Texas's specific law should be struck down because it is not well-crafted to survive a First Amendment challenge. But the decision is also significant because it is a contraction of First Amendment rights. (The First Amendment has long been understood to protect both the right of speakers and artists to say what they want, and the right of consumers to receive books and other materials that the government might find objectionable.) The fact that the Court was willing to shrink Americans' free speech rights in Free Speech Coalition suggests that they may do so again in a future case. And a case asking the justices to do so is now before them. NetChoice v. Fitch, which is currently on the Court's 'shadow docket,' concerns a Mississippi law that requires social media platforms to verify the ages of their users, and to require young people to obtain a parent or guardian's permission before they can set up an account with one of these platforms. Under existing Supreme Court precedents, this Mississippi law is clearly unconstitutional. In Brown v. Entertainment Merchants Association (2011), the Court struck down a similar California law that prohibited the sale of 'violent video games' to minors (but permitted a child's parent to buy the game for them). As Justice Antonin Scalia wrote in Brown, a state's power to 'protect children from harm…does not include a free-floating power to restrict the ideas to which children may be exposed.' The Court held that speech 'that is neither obscene as to youths nor subject to some other legitimate proscription cannot be suppressed solely to protect the young from ideas or images that a legislative body thinks unsuitable for them.' Nevertheless, the Court's decision to abandon Ashcroft in its more recent porn case suggests that it could also abandon Brown and uphold Mississippi's social media restrictions. Fitch, in other words, is worth watching closely, not necessarily because the justices are likely to roll back First Amendment rights even further, but more so because it is the first significant First Amendment case to reach the Court since Free Speech Coalition. And the new case raises a similar question about whether children and teenagers still enjoy robust free speech rights. 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The law lists several ways that social media companies may determine if a parent consented to their child using the company's service, including 'providing a form for the minor's parent or guardian to sign and return to the digital service provider by common carrier, facsimile, or electronic scan.' Realistically, nothing prevents a child who wants to set up a YouTube account from printing out this form, forging their parent's signature, and then creating the account. It's not at all clear how social media platforms are supposed to determine who actually signed this form. Still, the Mississippi law, at least, purports to ban social media companies from giving accounts to children without their parents' consent. The primary issue before the Supreme Court in Fitch is whether the First Amendment permits a state to impose such a barrier between young people and some of the primary platforms people use to communicate in 2025. Again, this isn't a particularly difficult question under Brown. Brown held that California's law restricting video game sales to minors is subject to 'strict scrutiny,' the toughest legal test that courts apply in constitutional cases. The overwhelming majority of laws subject to this test are struck down. In Free Speech Coalition, however, the Court ruled that a more permissive test, known as 'intermediate scrutiny,' applies to laws seeking to prevent children from accessing speech that is 'obscene only to minors' — here, the term 'obscene' refers to sexual content that lacks 'serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value.' Under intermediate scrutiny, the Court said in Free Speech Coalition, 'a law will survive review 'if it advances important governmental interests unrelated to the suppression of free speech and does not burden substantially more speech than necessary to further those interests.'' In its brief to the justices, Mississippi says that its law was enacted to shield young people from potentially harmful sexual speech. 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