Prosecutor General’s office requests rescindment of ruling against woman who re-posted child abuse video

Russia’s Deputy Prosecutor General Leonid Korzhinek spoke before the country’s Supreme Court on Thursday against the verdict passed down to Yevgenia Chudnovets, who was convicted for reposting a video of a child being abused. In his presentation, Korzhinek argued that there was no corpus delicti in the case against Chudnovets.

The Prosecutor General officially announced that the presentation had been made by publishing a statement on its website at 00:37 AM Moscow time on the night of February 23.

• In November 2016, Yevgenia Chudnovets – a preschool teacher from Ekaterinburg –was sentenced to six months in prison for “distributing child pornography.” The preschool teacher had posted a video of a naked child being bullied by camp counselors. The video showed counselors at a children’s camp in Kataysk mocking one of the wards. After the video’s publication, a counselor and the camp head were sentenced to terms of three and six years in prison respectively.
• Chudnovets herself had no connection to the video, but had simply shared it on a group in social network VKontakte.
• Earlier, the prosecutor’s office asked that Chudnovets’ sentence be lessened, as she has a three-year-old son. The sentence also angered Russia’s Children’s Rights Commissioner Anna Kuznetsova.
• In December 2016, another court reduced her sentence to five months.