Hottabych is justified

Karelian human rights activist Yuri Dmitriev is justified by pornographic articles, but sentenced to restrict freedom for storing weapons

Photo: Activatica.org

The court of Petrozavodsk justified the head of the Karelian “Memorial” by Yuri Dmitriev under articles on depraved actions and the manufacture of children's pornography. At the same time, he is found guilty under the article on storage of weapons. According to Mediazona , Dmitriev was sentenced to two and a half years of restriction of freedom.

On the day of announcement of the sentence, the Russian Human Rights Council made an appeal in which, having focused on violations at the stage of initiating a criminal case, preliminary investigation and trial, said that Dmitriev’s prosecution is untenable.

The historian and human rights activist Dmitriev was detained on December 13, 2016, accusing the adoptive daughter of the adopted daughter of the production and storage in the family archive, which the investigation considered pornographic. Investigators learned that these photos exist from an anonymous letter. Dmitriev himself said that a couple of weeks before the arrest, he discovered that someone had penetrated his apartment and checked the information stored on the computer. In an interview with NT, the historian said that the court refused to investigate the origin of this anonymous.

During the first audit, experts of the Center for Sociocultural Expertise recognized nine out of 140 photos of Dmitriev with pornographic. However, with a second examination, not a single picture was recognized as pornographic

During the first audit, experts of the Center for Sociocultural Expertise recognized nine out of 140 photos of Dmitriev with pornographic. However, with a second examination , not a single picture was recognized as pornographic. Dmitriev photographed a daughter without clothes to control her physical development and report to the guardianship.

Later, other charges appeared in the case, in particular, the illegal storage of firearms: as evidence, the investigators presented a rusty cut of the old gun, which, as Dmitriev himself said, he took away from the children in the yard 20 years ago.

Dozens of public figures spoke in defense of Dmitriev. Among them, the writers Lyudmila Ulitskaya, Vladimir Voinovich, Dmitry Bykov, Igor Guberman, the artists Inna Churikova, Leah Akhedzhakova, Evgeny Zakochkin, playwright Alexander Gelman, directors Vladimir Mirzoev, Yuri Norstein, journalists Alexander Arkhangelsky, Nikolai Svanidze and others.

Since the late 1990s, Yuri Dmitriev has been engaged in human rights activities, the restoration of the rights of rehabilitated victims of political repression. He compiled and published “Books for the Memory of the Victims of Political Repressions of the 1930s and 1940s in Karelia”, collected an archive of materials on the history of the construction of the Belomore-Baltic Canal: it was he who discovered the cemetery of the tortured builders of the White Sea on the 8th gateway. He studied the places of camp cemeteries of the prisoners of the Gulag in different parts of Karelia. In 1997, he discovered Sandarmokh - the place of execution and burial of more than 9 thousand people during the great terror. The associates of the historian believe that he is persecuted by the Karelian security forces for many years of work to restore memory of the victims of political repression.

On December 27, 2018,the Petrozavodsk City Court did not extend the arrest of the historian. At the same time, the court granted the prosecutor’s request to send Dmitriev to a stationary psychiatric examination. The results of a psychiatric examination showed that Dmitriev is mentally healthy and has no sexual deviations. At the end of January, he was released from a pre -trial detention center on a recognizance not to leave.

Nevertheless, during the debate, the prosecutor's office requested 9 years in a maximum security colony for Dmitriev. The lawyer of the historian Viktor Anufriev then stated that the case "should not have entered the court at all, because there was no corpus delicti here."