Strasbourg will protect the fatherland

Navalny and officers, thanks to the ECHR, increased the chances of defense for thousands of accused and defendants in Russia

On February 23, on the Day of the Defender of the Fatherland, in our opinion, the European Court of Human Rights satisfied the complaint of Alexei Navalny and Peter Officer to the verdict of the Lenin Court of Kirov in the Kirovles case. The decision regarding the violation of their rights to a fair trial (Article 6 of the Convention on the Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms) seven judges supported unanimously, and three, including a judge from Russia, even insisted on strengthening the argument in favor of the applicants.

Navalny and officers (4 years of imprisonment conditionally) believe that the law was applied to them in an “unpredictable way”. However, who in Russia is best predicting sentences? Of course, the TV, and Dr. Alexander Bastrykin, who did not believe his subordinates, who three times at different levels terminated the case of Kirovles for lack of corpus delicti, back in the summer of 2012, 8 months before the trial, said that there was a crime.

The decision of the ECHR was also quite predictable, and “unpredictability” will begin just now: Russian justice does not understand what to do with it. The decision of the Constitutional Court of July 14, 2015, initiated by the deputies of the Duma against Strasbourg's intervention in the fight against internal enemies of the Russian Federation, will not help: in this case, the ECHR did not give any interpretations that would not have dispersed from the Constitution, but even from the Criminal Code and the Code of Criminal Procedure of the Russian Federation.

Russia, most likely, appeals this decision to pull the time, and will take several months to ensure that the Great House of the European Court confirms it. Then, the Supreme Court of the Russian Federation will have to cancel the verdict of the Lenin Court of Kirov “due to newly discovered circumstances” and send the case for a new consideration. And then there will be a dead end, because on the bypass path that was used to pass the first conviction to Navalny and Officer, the ECHR now hung “brick”.

“The Russian courts found Officer guilty of actions that are indistinguishable from ordinary entrepreneurial activity as an intermediary, and Navalny is that he organized this activity,” the decision says. Navalny was replaced by “embezzlement”, not even proving any benefit for him, and the officer-extracting income from ordinary mediation (abandoning the elective law enforcement, in Russia it would have to be transplanted by the children and wives of law enforcement agencies: they are most often in these “gaskets” at various levels and sit).

This is a direct accusation of Russian judges that they “did not sought to dispel the evidence of the violations ( L.N. ), in the decision of the ECHR, it sounds the worse for us. But from a practical point of view and for hundreds of other “sewn” cases, the second, procedural, argument used in the decision of the ECHR of February 23 is much more important.

The guilty sentence to Navalny and Officer of July 18, 2013 was based on another conviction - the director of the State Unitary Enterprise Kirovles V.P. Opalev, issued in December 2012, “in a special order” on the basis of his guilt and without verification of evidence (according to the so -called transaction with the investigation). Navalny appealed the verdict to Opalev, but he was refused with reference to the fact that he was not a participant in this case.

Having become the defendants in 2013, Navalny and officers claimed that the creation of the Vyatka Forest Company LLC optimized the sale of timber, which were previously sold right from the sawmills, and only Opalev was held by the previous version of the “embezzlement”, for which he probably had some motives in Kirov.

So, the ECHR “found that as a result of the allocation of a criminal case against an accomplice of the theft accused of conspiracy with the applicants and his conviction in the order of special proceedings, the applicants were deprived of significant guarantees of their right to a fair trial. In particular, the conviction in relation to this person admitted the wording that left no doubt that the applicants were accomplices in this crime. ”

The “special procedure for considering a criminal case” (Chapter 40 of the Code of Criminal Procedure of the Russian Federation) was put into effect in 2002 with the good purpose of simplifying and reducing the timing of minor charges, but soon, like many other institutions of the Code of Criminal Procedure, was perverted and used for artificial creation of prejudice. On the basis of the sentence, “in the order of transaction with the investigation”, hundreds have been convicted and are waiting for sentences, but rather thousands of accused both on political (“swamp”) and “economic” and other general -round matters.

Unfortunately, the legislation of the Russian Federation does not have a mechanism that would have entered the review on the basis of the precedent decision of the ECHR of other similar cases, but when the accused will reach the European Court, in Strasbourg this decision regarding the “special order” will now duplicate this decision.

The fact that Russian courts become only an element of propaganda and prefix to the TV is not indicated in the decision of the ECHR, but this is already clear to everyone.