The Strength and Weakness of Pardon

The release of Sevastidi lines up with the acquittals of the last days, but...

President Putin’s act of pardoning Oksana Sevastidi, elegantly unveiled by March 8, is an extremely clear signal of his intention to somehow correct the “repressive political culture” that has taken root in the country, primarily due to the accusatory bias in judicial practice.

Vladimir Putin, unlike Boris Yeltsin, has so far exercised his right to pardon very carefully. Last year, he issued two such decrees: Stanislav Somov, a former employee of the Internal Affairs Directorate for the Moscow Region, and Ukrainian pilot Nadezhda Savchenko, were released from serving their sentences. The second decree, in any case, turned out to be more an act of diplomatic play than mercy: Savchenko was immediately exchanged for two Russians convicted in Kiev in connection with hostilities in the Donbass.

A completely different character is given - and even defiantly - to the pardon of Sevastidi, sentenced in 2016 to 7 years in prison for SMS, in which in 2008 she answered in the affirmative to the question of her casual acquaintance from Georgia, did she see trains with military equipment in the area? Sochi. At the level of common sense, one can argue that such SMS is not yet proof of intent to treason and espionage (for which Sevastidi was convicted), but the courts are not always friendly with common sense. And from the point of view of law enforcement practice, this was a signal of "tightening the screws", all the more clear that, answering a question about this verdict on December 23 during the annual press conference, Putin replied that he found it "tough enough", but it was "difficult for him comment on it, because the judiciary is an independent branch of power.”

In December 2001, when liquidating the former Pardon Commission headed by the writer Anatoly Pristavkin (it prepared documents according to which more than 57,000 convicts were released from serving sentences), Putin explained his decision as follows: “They only regretted it, but only regret." Well, now he decided to demonstrate that mercy is also not alien to the security system he built, and the revisions of the cases of Ildar Dadin and Yevgenia Chudnovets, which are actually synchronous with this gesture, show that this line is to some extent even imposed on the “independent judicial system” (the courts accepted these acquittals in the first case at the direction of the Constitutional Court of the Russian Federation, in the second - at the request of the Prosecutor General's Office).

The issue of “repressive political culture” was raised by me before the President at his meeting with the Council for the Development of Civil Society and Human Rights on December 8, 2016, using the case of Mavlud Kerimov as an example. A medical student from Stavropol, deceived into Turkey allegedly as a doctor, he was rescued from the clutches of the banned ISIS by his sister Farida, returned home, repented, and after almost a year of peaceful life was sentenced to 6 years in prison (see also Novaya No. 136 dated December 5, 2016). Based on this example, I posed the question: “Not for what, but why?”. Has the state already forgotten how to speak with people in a language other than force and repression? Putin replied that he was “entirely on our side.”

Of course, I don't think that it was I who convinced him with this really touching and heroic story, but perhaps we (HRC) did too. I don't know how much the president's heart actually softened, although this is, in general, typical of our age. But we understand what he wants to do or, in any case, designate as a corrected trend in law enforcement, and above all judicial practice.

On February 28, the Judicial Collegium of the Supreme Court of the Russian Federation on appeal upheld the verdict of the North Caucasian District Military Court against Kerimov, without knocking off at least part of the term, although such a compromise was seen as “acceptable” for Center “E”, which built the “Kerimov case”. The judges completely ignored all the arguments of the defense and about voluntary refusal to commit a crime (Mavlud began calling and writing to his family asking for help from a hotel in Istanbul), and that it was not him in Stavropol who was recruiting other students - members of the "medical jamaat”, but, on the contrary, they recruited him (in favor of this version, the first, but then changed, testimonies of all the detainees testified).

After collecting additional materials, we will analyze this case in detail, which was twice reported to the president. For now, we can briefly report that his “signal” to correct the “repressive political culture” is unlikely to be heard by the system of “courts and law enforcement agencies” without “quite tough” personnel decisions. The power structures, which, if we count from the symbolic moment of the liquidation of the "Pristavkin Commission" in 2001, have gained monstrous inertia, do not understand anything but force themselves.