Crimean Tatars demand voting rights

A large group of Tatars have staged a demonstration in the Crimean capital of Simferopol to demand full voting rights.

Over the past ten years, more than two-hundred-and-fifty-thousand Tatars have returned to the semi-autonomous region of Crimea in Ukraine from exile in central Asia , where they were sent by Stalin in 1944.

But about one-hundred-thousand of the more recent arrivals do not have Ukrainian citizenship and consequently cannot vote in the regional parliamentary elections in three weeks' time.

The Tatars, who are outnumbered by Russians and Ukrainians ten to one in Crimea, are also demanding a quota of seats.

From the newsroom of the BBC World Service