An American's exoneration

Russian court hands down rare acquittal to foreign journalist charged with joining anti-Kremlin protesters

On June 6, Tverskoy District Court Judge Ekaterina Korotova threw out the misdemeanor charges against American journalist Alec Luhn, who was detained for attending an illegal protest in Moscow on March 26. Police officers say they detained a journalist speaking broken Russian for shouting political slogans at the rally. Luhn says he was covering anti-corruption protests that day for The Guardian, and claims he repeatedly showed his press accreditation to the police. In a country where acquittals are as rare as the Blue-footed booby, Judge Korotova ruled that Luhn committed no crime, making him the first person detained on March 26 to be exonerated in court.

The first hearing in Luhn’s case took place on May 19, when the journalist’s lawyer, Ilya Novikov, asked the judge to admit a written explanation by Luhn — translated into Russian — about his actions at the March 26 protest. When Judge Korotova asked how she could explain the defendant's rights to Luhn, if he has only a weak grasp of Russian, Novikov answered that a translator would be necessary.

After that first hearing, Novikov told Meduza that his client hadn’t been provided a translator when he was detained and processed by police: “This was a violation of his rights. To agree to a trial without an interpreter would, in a sense, justify the actions of the police.”

Back in the courtroom on June 6, Korotova thanked the defense. In addition to the usual list of questions, the judge decided to ask the American journalist if he trusted the court. Luhn answered that he did.

After an interpreter translated for Luhn all the rights read out by the judge, Luhn’s lawyer asked the court to accept as evidence a letter from Russia’s Foreign Ministry verifying that Alec Luhn is accredited to work in Russia as a journalist. Novikov also produced an explanation from The Guardian showing that the newspaper’s Moscow correspondent carried out an editorial assignment on March 26. Finally, the lawyer provided recorded testimony from Christian Esch, a German reporter for Der Spiegel and an eyewitness to Luhn’s detention, confirming that Luhn didn’t actually participate in the protest.

Ilya Novikov then read aloud his client’s written explanation, where Luhn said that he went to Tverskaya Street on March 26 on an assignment from his newsroom. Luhn says he carried no paraphernalia, and shouted no slogans. When riot police detained him, Luhn says he repeatedly told them that he is a foreign journalist, and showed them his press credentials, but the officers “either didn’t understand or pretended like they didn’t understand.” Luhn also pointed out that staff at the police department later asked the officers to provide him with a lawyer and a translator, but these requests went ignored, and Luhn was only released after The Guardian appealed directly to the Foreign Ministry.

In response, Judge Korotova read out the charges against Luhn, filed by police officers on March 26, stating that Alec Luhn participated in an illegal demonstration “as part of a group of 2,000 people,” disturbing the peace and “chanting political slogans.”

The court then revealed that the initial charges against Luhn were dropped because of inaccuracies in the original paperwork. Police officers later drew up new charges, this time in Luhn’s absence, the judge explained.

Next, Novikov drew the judge’s attention to that fact that none of the charges contained information about whether Luhn speaks Russian, the language of the legal proceedings, or whether he was provided a translator, making them “inadmissible as evidence,” the lawyer argued.

Novikov then asked the judge to quash the indictment against his client, calling the charges a “procedural and factual mistake,” suggesting that police officers confused Luhn for someone else in the crowd. The lawyer even hinted that the police in Moscow’s Levoberezhny District may simply have been inexperienced, given that they aren’t often called to work at mass protests.

After a short recess, Judge Korotova agreed with Novikov’s arguments and ended the trial, making Alec Luhn the first person detained on March 26 to be acquitted in court.

Ilya Novikov called the judge’s decision “a first sign” in the March 26 prosecutions: “This is the first case where a court has acquitted a person falsely accused of illegal actions at a March 26 demonstration. Now we know that something can be done, at least in the most insane cases. I don’t know if the judge will face any trouble after this decision, but she did what she had to do. We actually didn’t expect this ruling. After all, other judges should have done the same thing [in past cases], but they didn’t.”

Alec Luhn says he plans to cover the next anti-corruption protests by Alexey Navalny’s supporters, scheduled for June 12. “There’s no neater way I can do this, since my job is to put myself at the center of what’s happening,” Luhn told Meduza on Tuesday, speaking in Russian.

Russian text by Sasha Sulim, translated by Kevin Rothrock