Sentence to Yegor Zhukov appealed

The defense asks for the annulment of the verdict and termination of the criminal prosecution.

On December 16, 2019, the head of the Agora International Human Rights Group, Pavel Chikov, announced that Leonid Solovyov, a lawyer for HSE student and video blogger Yegor Zhukov, had appealed the sentence handed down to his client on December 6, 2019 by the Kuntsevsky District Court of Moscow. The defense asks to cancel the verdict and stop the criminal prosecution of Zhukov.

Recall that Zhukov was found guilty of inciting extremist activities on the Internet under Part 2 of Art. 280 of the Criminal Code and sentenced to three years of probation with a two-year ban on site administration and similar activities.

Initially, Zhukov was charged with participating in mass riots in Moscow on July 27, 2019 (part 2 of article 212 of the Criminal Code) and arrested, but on September 3 he was charged with incitement to extremism, and he was placed under house arrest. The accusation was related to the publication on the Zhukov's Blog channel on YouTube of videos "Rally on October 7 or how the protest is leaked", "Peaceful revolution is possible (evidence)", "Rallies. What's next" and "Boycott of the elections is just the beginning." The public prosecutor asked the court to sentence Zhukov to four years in prison.

From our point of view, Zhukov was convicted under Art. 280 of the Criminal Code is illegal. In these videos, he calls on the opposition to a more active and thoughtful struggle against the state system that has developed in Russia, but promotes exclusively non-violent methods of resistance, a list of which he learned from the ideologist of non-violent struggle Gene Sharp and which he proclaims the most effective, based on the research of political scientist Erica Chenoweth. The methods of political struggle listed by Zhukov, from our point of view, do not fall under the definition of extremist activity in the relevant law, which covers precisely violent actions against the authorities.

Sources

• Yegor Zhukov appealed the verdict // Meduza. 2019. December 16.