One year less

On November 3, the Supreme Court reduced the suspended sentence for activist of the PORTOS association Yulia Privedennaya from 4.5 to 3.5 years.

According to her lawyer Mikhail Trepashkin, cited by Gazeta.Ru, the charge of unlawful imprisonment was dropped from Privedennaya due to the expiration of the statute of limitations. The charges of leadership of an illegal armed group and of torture remain in force. The verdict states that activists of PORTOS (Poeticized Association for the Development of the Theory of Social Happiness) illegally detained four teenagers from Ukraine at their base, who were forced to do hard work and write poetry. They were allegedly re-educated within the framework of the theory of general happiness.

During the trial in the case of Privedennaya, many violations were committed. Thus, the teenagers with whom she is accused of torturing, according to the lawyer of one of them, were kept in December 2000 for three days in the RUBOP in conditions not intended for holding people, without food, without a place to sleep, under continuous threats and pressure, interrogated without a lawyer or legal representative. Nearby, RUBOP officers beat up representatives of PORTOS and threatened the teenagers that they would do the same to them if they did not give the testimony necessary to the investigation. Judge Andrei Vyunov refused to allow the lawyer of one of the victims to exclude from the case materials the protocol that his client signed without reading. By the way, in this protocol, obtained by illegal methods, the Given is not mentioned at all. The judge refused to summon the victim to court, as well as to summon the mentioned Rubopovites, who, after interrogating the teenager, were convicted of exceeding official authority in other cases. The judge also refused to suspend the judicial investigation due to the discovery of tuberculosis in Yulia Privedennaya, although Trepashkin presented him with the necessary certificate. The prosecutor also drew attention to the defendant’s health, but the judge was adamant.

During the entire trial, not a single piece of evidence of Privedennaya’s guilt was heard in court; not even a single fact of her possible guilt was mentioned.