Pussy Riot members freed from Russian jail

Two jailed Pussy Riot members will be released from a Russian prison Thursday after the country's parliament adopted an amnesty pushed by President Vladimir Putin.

The release of Nadezhda Tolokonnikova and Maria Alyokhina comes four months before their sentences were to end in March. The two women were convicted of "hooliganism motivated by religious hatred" for performing a 40-second anti-Putin “punk prayer” at Moscow’s Christ the Savior Cathedral in February 2012.

Last week a formal ruling by Russia's Supreme Court determined that the two-year sentences imposed on the women in August last year were illegal.

President Vladimir Putin announced the amnesty in a gesture to mark the 20 years since Russia adopted a new constitution in 1993. The bill offers amnesty for people convicted of nonviolent crimes.

Russian lawmakers voted 446-0 in favor of the bill Wednesday, which many claim is a move to soothe critics who oppose Russia's feeble human rights record.

Tolokonnikova is currently being held in a prison hospital near Krasnoyarsk. She was transferred there in mid-November following two hunger strikes she staged to protest the treatment she was receiving in jail.

Alokhyina began serving her sentence in the Urals before being transferred to Nizhny Novgorod.

Prison officials at both facilities said the women would be released Thursday.

Greenpeace's 'Arctic 30' activists, who were arrested for piracy in the Barents Sea in September, will also be set free by the bill.

[Hollywood Reporter]