"I really want to start suing soon"

The Moscow City Court left Zhenya Berkovich and Svetlana Petriychuk in prison

On February 13, the Moscow City Court left the decision of the Zamoskvoretsky court to extend the period of detention to the director Zhenya Berkovich and the playwright Svetlana Petriychuk. They will remain in prison until March 10. By that time, the investigator must draw up an indictment in the final edition, present him to the accused and transfer the case to the prosecutor, and he was already to the court.

At this meeting, Zhenya Berkovich and Svetlana Petriychuk were present in the video. And Zhenya, turning to the court, no longer read poetry, as last time. Her voice sounded tired, but firmly. She repeated the words of Sveta Petriychuk: "We are sitting in order to sit."

In principle, it is not clear to the accused and their defenders why the investigator is so pulling, why he does not charge, because he has already fulfilled all investigative actions, and he only had to write an indictment.

It is clear to me personally that the investigator is most likely not independent. And the curators of this are extremely absurd and cruel, do not give him instructions to rush to the transfer of the case to court.

At first it seemed that the verdict would be sent to the presidential election, now it seems that - after. "But do the presidential elections have a meaning for the court decision?" - You ask. It would seem that they should not.

Why then the investigator pulls? There is no answer. Zhenya does not also have him. She spoke about this in her speech from SIZO-6.

Evgenia Berkovich:

“Naturally, every time, with each extension, the feeling that“ we are sitting in order to sit, ”as Sveta said, intensifies. All this time, the matter is consciously, frankly, cynically delayed. And now this sensation has turned into absolute confidence. Moreover, I know for sure that there is no such investigator in the Russian Federation, a judge and such a prosecutor who would not know and did not understand that six volumes of case, nine or ten questioned witnesses and two and a half examination, including psychological and psychiatric, which took an hour, is not a matter of particular complexity.

This is obviously not for everyone, but the judge who made the decision on January 9 to extend the preventive measure, absolutely one hundred percent, knows and understands that this is not a matter of particular complexity, it cannot be investigated for so much time and so on. So this is at least a judicial error.

The judge got the opportunity to explore evidence and see that these evidence is not evidence. <...> For six months we were waiting for the last examination. On November 24, we received this examination.

I am terribly sorry that this meeting is, as it is suppressed, I really want to start suing in order to be able to finally talk in court about the content of this examination. It, in particular, states that Muslim marriage is a marriage between a potential terrorist and action movie. I think that thirty million Russian Muslims, too, will probably want to ask questions about this.

The examination has 64 pages, but the examination itself is five pages. That is, five pages wrote for six months, and now the investigator writes the accusation of the final edition for three months. Honestly, if I had not sat in a pre -trial detention center, I probably would have thought: what is it, "accusation of the final edition." But in nine months I know that the accusation of the final version is several pages and usually a copy -paste of the initial prosecution. I looked a lot, women in a pre -trial detention center love to talk and show their indictments <...>.

If you count from the day when the first destructive examination was ordered, more than a year has passed. Any judge sees that this is a tightening of the case. I really expect that you, your honor, of course, understand this, and I ask you to cancel the decision of the Zamoskvoretsky court and make a fair, adequate to the law of the Russian Federation and simply human justice. ”

On the year in the hall of the Court of Appeal, the political scientist Boris Kagarlitsky was taken into custody*. He was accused under the same article as the authors of the play “Finist Yasny Falcon” - “Execution of terrorism”. Earlier, the military court sentenced Kagarlitsky to a fine, but the verdict was replaced by a real term in appeal. And this is very bad news for Zhenya Berkovich and Svetlana Petriychuk. However, as for all of us.

* Entered by the Russian authorities in the register of "foreign agents"