Translated material
Political pressure: media digest (June 5-10, 2015)
"Bolotnaya case"
Alexey Gaskarov appealed to the ECHR
“ As Kommersant has learned, anti-fascist Alexei Gaskarov, convicted in the Bolotnaya case, filed a complaint with the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR), where there are already ten lawsuits against the Russian Federation from other defendants in the case of the May 6, 2012 riots. If the ECHR rules in favor of Mr. Gaskarov, the Supreme Court of the Russian Federation may review his sentence, but by then he will most likely have already served his sentence.
Alexey Gaskarov’s defense sent documents to the ECHR last Friday. The complaint to Strasbourg, available to Kommersant, consists of 11 pages, not counting numerous appendices. In it, the person involved in the “Bolotnaya case” demands that the Russian Federation be found guilty of violating four key articles of the European Convention for the Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms: the rights to a fair trial, freedom of opinion and freedom of assembly, as well as the prohibition of torture. <…>
The complaint alleges that the police themselves instigated the riots in the square. As Natasha Dobreva, the lawyer of the opposition leader in Strasbourg, writes in the complaint, “it looks more like the authorities were going to intimidate the protest masses.” “The police, without warning, blocked the passage to the stage, creating a crush during the rally, which ultimately provoked the arrests,” the lawyer writes. <…>
“The verdict against Alexey Gaskarov is based on the testimony of two police officers who failed to report what injuries the defendant actually inflicted on them,” the complaint states.
As the practice of previous appeals of those involved in the “Bolotnaya case” to the ECHR shows, Alexey Gaskarov’s complaint has a high chance of being communicated. Earlier, ten other people convicted in the case of mass riots turned to Strasbourg. Their cases were consolidated into one proceeding, and the ECHR judges gave them priority. According to lawyer Sergei Golubok, who regularly deals with complaints in the Strasbourg court, the decision in the case of Alexei Gaskarov may have several consequences at once. “The ECHR is very sensitive to complaints regarding the state’s inability to ensure order at sanctioned rallies, which results in a violation of the right to freedom of assembly,” he explained to Kommersant. “The judges in this regard can make a rather harsh decision against the Russian Federation.” If the ECHR recognizes that Mr. Gaskarov was deprived of the right to a fair trial, then his case may await review by the Supreme Court, Mr. Golubok believes: “The Supreme Court often reviews cases in which similar decisions are made in Strasbourg. Another question is what Taking into account the duration of all procedures, Gaskarov will have already served his entire sentence by that time."
prosecution
A new case has been opened regarding repeated violation of the procedure for holding public events
“As a preventive measure, the investigator chose a written undertaking not to leave the place for civil activist Irina Kalmykova. She also conducted the first interrogation of the activist. This was reported to Kasparov.Ru by activist Vera Lavreshina, who came to the Investigative Committee for the Central Administrative District to support the accused. Kalmykova is accused of participating in four actions, which the investigation considers “uncoordinated.” We are talking about two single pickets - in honor of the birthday of Nadezhda Savechnko at the pre-trial detention center where the Ukrainian pilot is being held, and in support of the "prisoners of May 6" on Bolotnaya Square, as well as a flash mob of the Yabloko party in support of entrepreneurs who have become victims of the economic policies of the authorities and the January rally in support of Savchenko at Lubyanka. Let us note that, by law, single pickets do not require approval or notification of the authorities about their holding. “I admitted that yes, I was at these rallies. I’m not going to give up my views. For me, the truth is more important. If in our country people are imprisoned for telling the truth, it’s their problem, not mine,” the activist said after interrogation.”
OVD-Info: conversation with Irina Kalmykova
In Izhevsk, the case of a Falun Gong follower was brought to court
“On June 10, 2015, it is known that in Izhevsk a criminal case under Art. 282 of the Criminal Code (incitement of religious hatred) against local resident Shamil Garayev. In April 2015, proceedings against Garayev were discontinued due to the expiration of the statute of limitations, but were likely challenged by the prosecutor's office.
Garayev is accused of posting the book “Falun Dafa” on his website falundafa.udm.ru in 2012. Experts found that the contents of the book were identical to the contents of Li Hongzhi's banned book "Zhuan Falun" and stated that it contained propaganda of the superiority of Li Hongzhi's ideas and views over others and "negative and hostile statements about Orthodox Christianity." In addition, the investigation brought two witnesses who said that the book hurt their religious feelings.
This is the first criminal case against a Falun Gong practitioner that we know of.”
A case of calls for extremism has been opened against a Kursk activist
“On June 8, 2015, it became known that a case had been opened in Kursk under Part 2 of Art. 280 of the Criminal Code (public calls for extremist activities made using the Internet) against left-wing activist Sergei Lavrov. The reason for criminal prosecution was a video posted by an activist on YouTube in August 2014.
On May 29, 2015, a search was carried out in Lavrov’s apartment. During it, the FSB officers who carried out the investigative actions, according to the activist, said that investigators from Krasnodar would be looking into his case. Lavrov believes that the persecution is being carried out in order to obtain testimony from him against Daria Polyudova , whom he actively supported during her arrest.
The video, the placement of which Lavrov is accused of posting, is a homemade slide show with official photographs of Putin, overlaid with the performance of the song “Holy War”, ending with a call for those dissatisfied with the regime to join the “special forces named after Chapaev.”
A student suspected of having links with Hizb ut-Tahrir was detained in St. Petersburg.
“On June 9, 2015 in St. Petersburg, as part of a criminal investigation under Part 1 of Art. 205.5 of the Criminal Code (organizing the activities of a terrorist organization), a student of the St. Petersburg State Maritime Technical University Ilyas Kadirov, suspected of belonging to the activities of Hizb ut-Tahrir, was detained. The question of a preventive measure is currently being decided.”
In Arkhangelsk, a case was opened against the editor-in-chief of an opposition newspaper for the acquisition and possession of drugs
“News of Arkhangelsk”, June 9 :
“ The Oktyabrsky District Court of Arkhangelsk detained the editor-in-chief of the newspaper Pravda Severo-Zapada for 2 months. Lawyers for the notorious opposition journalist intend to appeal the court's decision in the near future.
The meeting of the Oktyabrsky Court of Arkhangelsk has just ended, where a preventive measure was chosen against the editor-in-chief of the newspaper Pravda Severo-Zapada and the agency Ekho Severa, Ilya Azovsky, who came under investigation. The court decided to take the opposition journalist into custody for a period of two months, that is, until August 8 of this year, a News29 correspondent reports.
The court hearing, chaired by Judge Usachev, lasted about two hours. Azovsky was defended by three lawyers. The prosecutor and investigator acted on behalf of the prosecution.
“I ask you not to get hung up on my person. It’s better to tell us about how people are sitting in this isolation ward. It’s very cold there. The air temperature does not exceed 10 degrees Celsius. This is some kind of Middle Ages. I’m a strong person, I’ll get out. It’s not my fault I admit. The case is fabricated and is purely political in nature,” Ilya Azovsky said at the trial.
The journalist's lawyers intend to appeal the district court's decision to the regional court. “I believe that the court’s decision is unfounded, the investigation’s arguments are not convincing, there is no direct evidence,” one of Azovsky’s lawyers, Leonid Kozhevnikov, said in an interview with reporters. - We will appeal the court's decision.
Let us remind you that Ilya Azovsky is accused of purchasing and storing the narcotic substance amphetamine on an especially large scale. A criminal case has been opened. The editorial office of “PS-Z” explains this fact by “the political nature and independent position of the journalist” on the eve of early elections for the governor of the Arkhangelsk region, which will be held in September.”
A civil activist was detained in Omsk in connection with a publication published four years ago.
“Viktor [Korb] was detained right in the trolleybus by FSB and police officers when he was heading to the Ecopicnic event to participate in a discussion.
Viktor was forcibly taken to the Ministry of Internal Affairs of the Soviet Administrative District of Omsk and charged with distributing “extremist materials.”
Then he was brought to court, but the judge on duty saw a lot of procedural violations in the detention of Viktor Korb and the drawing up of the administrative protocol on the detention and refused to consider the case.
I sent it to the Omsk Department of Internal Affairs for proper registration. Currently, Victor Korb is at home. We are monitoring developments."
extrajudicial prosecution
On the persecution of unreliable Cossacks
“In Podolsk, searches were carried out at the Museum of Anti-Bolshevik Resistance and the house of its founder, Cossack movement activist Vladimir Melikhov. He is called an influential ideologist of the revival of Cossack self-government on the Don. The museum in Podolsk, as well as the memorial “Don Cossacks in the fight against Bolshevism” in the village of Elanskaya, were opened thanks to funding from his funds. The opening of the museum became the reason for discussions about the admissibility of including in the exhibition documents covering the history of collaboration in the Great Patriotic War and the biography of the leaders of collaborationist formations, in particular, generals Andrei Vlasov and Pyotr Krasnov.
A week ago, on May 29, Melikhov was supposed to fly to Munich, from where he was going to come to Lienz, Austria, to consecrate a chapel built in the city’s Cossack cemetery. However, border guards at Domodedovo airport forbade Melikhov to leave Russia under the pretext that his international passport was invalid - one of the pages was missing from it. An activist of the Cossack movement blamed the border guards for the incident, saying that it was they who spoiled his passport. Vladimir Melikhov spoke about this story and why Russian law enforcement agencies declared war on him in an interview with Radio Liberty.
– Like any passenger traveling to another country, I arrived at Domodedovo airport and provided my passport to receive a ticket at the place where baggage is checked in. They checked my passport, issued a ticket, I checked in my luggage and went to passport control. I come there, hand over my passport, as I have done a hundred times, especially since just a couple of weeks ago I was in Munich and I had this passport in the same bag. The border guard looked at him, then the phone rang into his booth, he listened to what was being said to him, without uttering a single word. After he hung up, he turned to me and said: “Wait.” After a while, two people came up, took my passport without explaining why they were taking it, and told me to wait. I waited at the post for about half an hour, maybe more. Then these two approached again and asked to go with them to the service room. They kept me there for another half hour, I knocked on the office and said that I already had a flight, I might be late. Then a man comes out, unfolds his passport and says: “Vladimir Petrovich, we can’t let you out. Because your passport is in poor condition. You see, you don’t have a page.” I realized that this was a provocation, I did not take it. I say: “You understand that the passport could not have been damaged by me, especially as delicately as you showed me.” It's literally cut out along the edge with a razor. “Then you draw up some kind of document for me that you are not letting me onto the plane because a page has been cut out in the passport, that is, justify it. Then I say: “Where is your head of the border post, with whom I could talk and try to figure it out.” with this situation?" Because literally two weeks ago I flew using this passport, and there were no problems. But not only that, I provided this passport five minutes ago, when I purchased a ticket, and there were no distortions in this passport, and the person The person who issued the ticket checked this passport. And third, how can you check 17 pages or 20, how many are there, the passport was out of my sight for an hour? If there was no page there, it could have been determined within. one or two minutes, no more. Why wait an hour? They said that we have enough competent people here to answer your questions, and the man came out, introduced himself as the shift manager of this border post and drew up a report. That’s all.
– The protocol was drawn up about what?
– About the fact that I tried to cross the border of the Russian Federation with a document that was damaged. Allegedly, I cut out the page in the passport myself. He was fined 2 thousand rubles for damaging a government document. I'm also to blame. And when I started saying: “Guys, you write that a page is missing, but why didn’t the border guard who was sitting in the booth identify this missing page? Why did you take my passport and I didn’t see it for an hour?” They said: "This is our right."
– So you didn’t receive any substantive explanations at all?
- None!
– And what do you intend to do now in connection with what happened?
– All this time we have been looking for similar cases with our lawyers, trying to find out if there is any judicial practice on them. It turned out that there is no judicial practice on these issues. There is only one case that was taken up by the ECHR, Shimovolos v. the Russian Federation (in 2011, the European Court of Human Rights recognized the inclusion of personal data about a person in a secret police database as inconsistent with the European Convention. - RS ) . He was detained illegally, but they detained him with the drawing up of a report that he was being detained because he could supposedly be carrying some kind of literature and so on. That is, there was a document with which one could go to court, to a higher organization. I don’t have a single document that I could refer to when declaring illegal actions of the authorities. There is only a protocol that I allegedly ruined my passport and wanted to cross the border.
– But will you complain to law enforcement agencies?
– No, we will write a letter to the border service, we are drawing this up, then to the Ministry of Internal Affairs regarding the so-called “ watch list ”, which includes all people who are undesirable to leave the Russian Federation, and they are stopped under various pretexts. I have a wild case, but in Rostov it’s exactly the same, well, not with cutting out pages from a passport, they just caught someone on the street when he was getting ready to go to the airport to go to the same place as me, to Lienz for the consecration of a chapel. They accused him of using obscene language, although I know this person. He never used swear words. This is a most cultured person. They imprisoned him just long enough for the tickets to disappear. Another person was charged with disorderly conduct. While they were sorting it out, the plane also left, etc. Four people were not released for this particular event in different parts of the Russian Federation, using different methods.
– Let’s return to the list of those citizens whose departure from the territory of the Russian Federation abroad is undesirable. Have you ever seen this list, this document? What names are included in it? Did they try to somehow get it so that it could be presented to you? Have you tried to somehow appeal the placement of you personally on this list?
– Until the moment when I was stopped at the border in this way - I was not allowed to fly out, I had no idea about this list. I was told this by the lawyers I started calling when I was stopped at the border. And we began to think about what to do next. I was flying before! I fly abroad 10–12 times a year. And I flew to the same Lienz two weeks before the events, when the last work on the chapel was already being done.
“Nevertheless, after discussing all this with lawyers, we came to the conclusion that the situation is completely stalemate, because there is no document that could be appealed.
– You can, of course, promote yourself, make some noise. But this is a waste of time, a waste of resources, which we don’t really have anyway, because we are constantly litigating other claims that are brought against us.
– Should we try to get acquainted with this list?
- But yes, yes. We prepared documents, described the situation, not only mine, but also those of those people who were detained in Rostov and Krasnodar. We ask the Ministry of Internal Affairs: on what grounds did this happen, firstly. Secondly, are we specifically, by listing names, under this “guard control”. And if so, on what basis and for what reasons are we included there?
- How are you now without a passport? Or do you no longer have any business abroad? And you won’t even risk leaving?
- Why? Naturally, we will apply for a new passport. I don’t know what reason they will look for not to give it. If they give it, then we will apply for visas again and travel, because I have a lot to do.
– How will you go through border control? Every time with a notary who will certify in front of the booth that everything is in place?
- In 80 percent of the comments on the record where I talked about the story with the passport, it is said about how now it is necessary to pass passport control. Like, you need to take pictures of the pages, shoot, go. People hope that with some of their so small tricks they will be able to overcome the car that we had built up all recently. You will take pictures - they will capture you and say that this is a secret object and still sew the article. Here the question is not in methods. The question in the mechanism itself, which is created in order to completely stop some human freedom even to move, is no longer talking about freedom of speech.
- So it would be more logical in this case to release those who are undesirable, and then not let them go back.
- There are also a lot of comments. It would be better if you were released and not allowed. We do not need such in Russia. But the question is that they know that I will always return. Because for me, Russia, at least before this case, was my Fatherland, for which I live, work and do the public work that I did until today. They understand this very well. I will never stay there. But they needed to prevent me from meeting with those people who came to Lienz from all over the world. Because these many people called me, wrote about the need to meet, about the need to resolve a number of issues. Here is their main task - to disrupt these meetings.
- For what? Why did the Russian authorities, the police, border guards did not want you to go to the consecration of the chapel in Lienz?
-Firstly, if I personally concerns me, then this story is long. Since 2007, they have all kinds of lawsuits, all kinds of hinders, false accusations of supposedly witnesses constantly want to bring me responsible for the social activity that we are conducting in terms of the creation of the Don Cossacks in the fight against the Bolsheviks. We went about 400 ships in 12 claims. And in almost all of them we won. Not only did we win, because the accusations were absolutely stupid and unreasonable, we still collected money from the prosecutor's office of the Rostov region - the cost of our courts. And here they have already decided not to get a bump, not to put on a mask of legality, but simply violently violating. This is the first, in my opinion - such revenge. The second reason is that I was the initiator of the construction of this chapel in Lienz. This chapel is located at the Cossack cemetery, who were issued in 1945 to the Stalin regime with children, women and old people. In our country, this is considered a terrible crime, an excuse for collaboration, although we never justify anything. We simply create those conditions that could remain in the human memory of the tragedy that the Russian people and Cossacks passed. Therefore, people came from all over the world. This is the only day (it was a 70th anniversary) when everyone gathered.
Naturally, everyone came to talk, get to know, solve some pressing issues that were worth it. So that I could not meet with them, I was not allowed.
- It turns out again personal revenge directly to you and the desire to prevent in activity. But what is the point of hindering if you are talking about the movement of the Cossacks in the fight against the Bolsheviks? In Russia, the Communist Party has not ruled for a long time, and a lot has already been said about Bolshevism.
- Do you often watch our television? Often watch our new ideologists-from Prokhanov and ending with old people who sleep and see and are now screaming about the USSR-2? You perfectly see what is happening in our country in terms of "rehabilitation" of the Stalinsky management system, about the solid hand that was in the USSR, about Soviet achievements. We have no our achievements over 25 years, so we dig and come up with in the Soviet period and assign these achievements to today's regime.
“And you are an extra link in this chain?”
- And we debunk this. They say that we are myth-making, and we say that they are myth-making, that the USSR fell apart due to objective reasons, and not the machinations of some enemies. It was originally laid as a system of both ideological, and economic, and in many other aspects so that it was supposed to collapse. It was a matter of time. They say: no, he was ruined on purpose so that we are weaker. This is absolute stupidity, but they build this stupidity to the rank of new ideology. And when we say that today's system, taking the analogies of the past Soviet period, is also doomed to destruction, only even worse than after the USSR. They say: and you are pests, you are enemies of the people. ”
Political emigration
Zhanna Nemtsova left Russia
“The eldest daughter of the murdered Russian opposition leader Boris Nemtsov left the country after threats began to come. Zhanna Nemtsova stated that everyone who is condemning President Putin is in danger. The former journalist accused the Russian leader of bearing the “political responsibility” for the murder of her father, a former deputy prime minister, shot in February, within sight of the Kremlin. She also criticized the official investigation of the murder. In a conversation with The Times, Ms. Nemtsova did not report where she lives now, and said that she did not know if he would ever return to [Russia]. ”