Pussy Riot member Maria Alyokhina has started a hunger strike in protest of being refused permission to attend her own parole hearing, report The Guardian.

Alyokhina appeared at the session via videolink, telling the court, "let the troika sitting here – the judge, the prosecutor and the colony employee – decide my fate," before announcing her hunger strike.

She had also refused to let lawyers further represent her in the hearing.

Alyokhina was jailed for two years in 2012, along with her bandmates Nadezhda Tolokonnikova and Yekaterina Samutsevich, after they performed an anti-Kremlin protest in Moscow's Cathedral Of Christ The Saviour. Samutsevich's sentence was subsequently suspended, though Tolokonnikova was refused bail last month.