The St. Petersburg City Court upheld the arrest of a participant in anti-corruption rallies in 2017

The St. Petersburg City Court upheld the decision to extend the arrest of a participant in the 2017 anti-corruption rallies, who was placed in a pre-trial detention center after being extradited from Ukraine. This was reported by a lawyer collaborating with OVD-Info, Ksenia Mikhailova.

The defense insisted that a St. Petersburg resident cannot be held in custody for more than six months on charges of a crime of medium gravity. The man is accused of hooliganism with the threat of violence against citizens (clause “a”, part 1, article 213 of the Criminal Code). His six months of arrest expired on February 27 - that is, the accused should have been released immediately after he was handed over to the Russian side. He has been under arrest since August 2021: at first the man was kept in Ukrainian pre-trial detention centers, then he was transferred to Russia - now he is in pre-trial detention center-1 in St. Petersburg.

However, the court found some excuse to extend the guard. Mikhailova could not clarify what the judge referred to, since she had not yet been given a reasoned decision. The lawyer believes that the court could have referred to Part 11 of Art. 109 Code of Criminal Procedure. According to this norm, the court can extend custody beyond the deadline in the case of those detained at the request of the Russian Federation on the territory of a foreign state.

• A resident of St. Petersburg, who wished not to disclose his name, was extradited to Russia in February 2022. He left the country at the end of 2017 after being detained on hooliganism charges. He was detained in the summer of 2020 by border guards in Ukraine, where he had come to visit his wife.
• According to investigators, a man allegedly fired several times from an unidentified object in the direction of another person in a certain crowded place in St. Petersburg. In 2017, officers put pressure on the detainee and forced him to incriminate himself under the threat of criminal charges under the article on assault on government officials, which entails a more severe punishment. Read more about the defendant’s case in the OVD-Info news .
• The protests, called “He’s Not Dimon to You,” based on the film of the same name prepared by the Anti-Corruption Foundation about property allegedly owned by then Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev, were held on March 26, 2017 in different cities of Russia. That day, according to various sources, from 36 to 88 thousand people in 97 cities took to the streets. In Moscow, 1,043 people were detained - more than during the rally on Bolotnaya Square on May 6, 2012. After the dispersal of the protests on March 26, nine people in three cities became involved in criminal cases. They were charged under Article 318 of the Criminal Code - use of violence against a government official.