The Leninsky District Court of Perm has arrested in absentia the former head of Perm's Memorial, Robert Latypov, in a case of attempted smuggling of cultural property (clause "b" of Part 2 of Article 226.1 of the Criminal Code with the application of Part 3 of Article 30 of the Criminal Code). This was reported by the Zvezda.Perm Telegram channel.
Latypov is abroad; he was put on the wanted list in September last year.
On May 19, 2023, large-scale searches were conducted in Perm in the homes of human rights activists and members of the board of the Center for Historical Memory. In particular, security forces came to the home of Tatyana Margolina and Svetlana Makovetskaya, members of the Human Rights Council under the President of the Russian Federation. After the searches, security forces opened a criminal case on attempted smuggling against Latypov and the chairman of the Perm Center for Historical Memory, Alexander Chernyshov, who at that time was serving an administrative arrest in a special detention center in Istra, Moscow Region, after being detained while flying out of Russia.
According to the investigation, Latypov and Chernyshov tried to “take Memorial documents from Russia to Germany that are of cultural and historical value.” After the case was opened, Chernyshov was placed in a pretrial detention center, and on April 4 of this year, the Industrial District Court sentenced him to three years probation.
In June 2023, Robert Latypov was included in the register of “foreign agents”.
- In April 2022, the Ministry of Justice announced the forced liquidation of Perm Memorial. All-Russian branches had been liquidated before that. In November 2021, the prosecutor's office filed lawsuits with the Moscow City Court to liquidate the Memorial Human Rights Center and with the Supreme Court to liquidate International Memorial . The reason was numerous violations of the law on "foreign agents" that the organizations allegedly committed. On December 28, the Supreme Court liquidated the International Society Memorial, and on December 29, the Moscow City Court made a similar decision regarding the Memorial Human Rights Center.