Defenders were not allowed to see Ivan Nepomishchikh in the Yaroslavl colony

Defenders Yakov Iontsev (“Public Verdict”) and Sergei Sharov-Delone (“Rus Sitting”) were not allowed to see the beaten prisoners in correctional colony No. 1 in the Yaroslavl region. The lawyers came to meet with their clients: the defendant in the “Bolotnaya case” Ivan Nepomnyashchikh, Ruslan Vakhapov and Evgeny Makarov. At the same time, the activists were examined by doctors.

As the Public Verdict Foundation writes on Facebook, the defenders waited three hours for the colony administration to consider the issue. The colony motivated its refusal to admit representatives by the fact that the letter of the ECHR, in which the Court obliges the government of the Russian Federation to ensure unhindered access for defense lawyers to the applicants, was not certified.

Ivan Nepomnyashchikh was sentenced to two and a half years in a general regime colony on charges of participating in mass riots that allegedly took place on May 6, 2012 on Bolotnaya Square in Moscow, and using violence against a government official.

According to defense attorney Sergei Sharov-Delone, on April 21, a special unit of the Federal Penitentiary Service entered the territory of IK-1, whose employees, “according to an established habit,” beat those who were in the colony’s isolation ward at that time. Before this, it became known that Nepomnyashchikh was placed in a punishment cell in the colony for 7 days. The next day, a search took place in the camp, during which the “masks” beat people in the detention center. Immediately after this, Nepomniachtchi and several other prisoners were transferred to a specially isolated part of the punishment cell - the “island”.

Earlier it became known that the Strasbourg court ordered the Russian authorities to provide, within two days, an independent medical examination of convicts serving their sentences in the Yaroslavl colony I. Nepomnyashchikh, Ruslan Vakhapov and Evgeniy Makarov.

The Foundation's blog states that "the administration's actions suggest that the applicants remain in danger because lawyers have had no way to ensure that the prisoners are okay."