Berkovich and Petriychuk will remain under arrest until September 10

Director Zhenya Berkovich and screenwriter Svetlana Petriychuk will remain under arrest until September 10, reports a Mediazona correspondent from the Khamovniki District Court of Moscow. Judge Ekaterina Pakhomova decided to extend the arrest, despite the fact that the Ministry of Justice recognized the expertise from the case as unscientific.

The case of Berkovich and Petriychuk contains a “destructological examination” by the religious scholar Roman Silantyev. In it, wrote Meduza , he argues that “radical feminism” is just as dangerous as the Islamic State. Before the start of the meeting, Sergei Badamshin, one of Petriychuk's lawyers, published the response of the Russian Official Center for Forensic Expertise under the Ministry of Justice to his lawyer's request. The document states that "destructological examination" cannot be evidence in court, since "destructology" is not a science.

“For this category of cases, judicial linguistic or complex psychological and linguistic examinations are appointed and carried out. Such examinations are carried out in RFTSSE. “Complex destructological” and other similar (with contrived names) examinations are not mentioned in these documents due to the lack of scientific validity in them,” the ministry’s response says.

Earlier, more than 30 Russian scientists signed an open letter demanding an end to the use of pseudosciences as areas of forensic science. Among the signatories were co-founders of Dissernet Andrey Rostovtsev and Andrey Zayakin, director of the Institute of the Russian Language of the Russian Academy of Sciences Fedor Uspensky and member of the Russian Academy of Sciences Commission to Combat Pseudoscience Alexander Panchin.

Speaking in court, Zhenya Berkovich asked to change her preventive measure to house arrest so that she could be with her adopted daughters: “I am now a mother, not a director. Should you stay at home? I will stay at home. And in two months, Mr. Investigator, it was possible to come up with at least one justification why I could not stay at home. Just to be able to hug children who are literally going crazy! They know what a mother is like in prison. They spent most of their lives in an orphanage. They know that if mom is in jail, she won't come back," she said.

Berkovich and Petriychuk have been in jail since May 5, 2023. They are being prosecuted under a criminal article on justifying terrorism (Part 2 of Article 205.2 of the Criminal Code) because of the play “Finist the Clear Falcon” about the fate of Russian women who decided to marry radical Islamists and went to live with them in Syria. In 2022, the production received two Golden Masks for the work of the playwright and the best costumes.

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