Court on tour

On February 15, a new trial of opposition politician Alexei Navalny will begin - he is accused of fraud with donations and insulting a judge. As in previous Navalny cases, the wording of the accusation and evidence raise questions. But the new trial was most unusual before it even began. On February 7, Margarita Kotova, a judge at the Lefortovo Court , announced that Navalny, who is already serving time, would not be taken to a Moscow pre-trial detention center to attend hearings, as is usually done. Instead, Kotova herself will go to the Vladimir colony to Navalny and will judge him right there.

Navalny's lawyer Olga Mikhailova has already stated on the air of Echo of Moscow that this was done in an attempt to close the process from the general public: “We, even as lawyers, will not be able to go there, as I understand it, to bring our gadgets, computers with which we need to work, voice recorders because it is a secure institution.” Navalny's defense intends to ensure that at least a broadcast for journalists is organized from the colony.

Mikhailova recalled that courts do happen in colonies, but only about applications for parole (or for medical reasons). The lawyers have not yet received the text of the decision explaining the reasons for such an unusual exit process, but Mikhailova suggested that the judge, as often happens recently, will refer to coronavirus restrictions.

The unusual format of the meeting, which was chosen by Judge Kotova, is reflected, among other things, in the card of Navalny's criminal case on the portal of Moscow courts. There, in the "Hall" column, it says "PKU IK-2 UFSIN of Russia in the Vladimir Region."

Kholod decided to check when and in what situations the Moscow judges used to choose “halls” outside the court buildings. To do this, we downloaded information about all 8.7 million court hearings in 4 million cases that were considered in Moscow over the past ten years (the most complete information is available only from 2016).

The press service of the Moscow City Court was unable to promptly comment to Kholod whether meetings of Moscow courts were ever held outside Moscow. But the data on the consideration of criminal cases on the merits (this is the process that Navalny will face) unambiguously say: Moscow courts in recent history did not hold such meetings in other regions. Only once in 2019, in one criminal case of fraud with apartments, 4 out of 78 meetings were held in the Matrosskaya Tishina pre-trial detention center in Moscow, a kilometer from the Preobrazhensky Court, where the case was considered. One of the four defendants was in the pre-trial detention center during the trial.

The data on the sessions in the pre-trial detention center may be incomplete. For example, in January 2018, hearings in the case of the former governor of the Kirov region Nikita Belykh were also held at the Matrosskaya Tishina hospital due to the deteriorating condition of the defendant. in the case file , as if the sessions continued in the Presnensky Court as usual. But this is not reflected

There are also exceptions when there are many defendants in a criminal case and the small halls of district courts simply cannot accommodate everyone without problems. Then the trials are transferred to the large halls of the Moscow City Court, as was the case, for example, with the Bolotnaya case in 2013. But such cases are extremely rare - in the data of the Moscow City Court there are only 49 such meetings.

In total, over the past six years, less than 0.01% of the hearings in criminal cases took place outside the buildings of the courts that heard them. And there was never any talk of moving to another region.

The most massive category of offsite hearings in Moscow courts is not in criminal cases: over 10,000 court hearings have taken place in city psychiatric hospitals over the past six years. But we are talking about only two courts: Preobrazhensky and Lublin. Until 2019, they held almost all meetings on involuntary hospitalization and incapacity right in nearby psychiatric hospitals. But in 2018, prosecutorial oversight of such cases was tightened , and now almost all meetings are held in the courthouse.

Update After the publication of this text, the RAPSI agency published a certificate from the Federal Penitentiary Service on court hearings in prisons, colonies and pre-trial detention centers and examples of meetings in Moscow pre-trial detention centers.

From the reference of the Federal Penitentiary Service, it follows that in 2019-2021 there were 8,947 such meetings (in cases of 9,057 people). But the vast majority of them, as lawyer Mikhailova said, are related to the request for parole and other issues related to serving the sentence.

Only 63 people in three years participated in meetings at the place of detention in connection with previous crimes - as is happening now with Alexei Navalny. This is 0.7% of all such hearings and only 0.003% of the total number of defendants over two and a half years (statistics for the second half of 2021 have not yet been published).

Not a single example, when a Moscow court would hold a meeting in a colony in another region, was not given in the FSIN certificate.