Mediazona reports from Karelia [R] that the Petrozavodsk City Court today added two years to Yury DMITRIEV’s sentence for offences of which he was previously twice acquitted.
(photo, Alla Konstaninova, Mediazona)
Petrozavodsk City Court, 27 December 2021
About 15 members of the public have been admitted, reports Sasha Kononova: the BBC and Russia’s NTV are filming; the official TASS news agency is there.
DMITRIEV’s friends and supporters from Moscow and Petersburg and his defence attorney Victor Anufriev are travelling north to Petrozavodsk to hear the announcement later this morning, writes Alla Shmaina-Velikanova.
Meanwhile, In Petrozavodsk Yury DMITRIEV and his family and friends are waiting for the morning. So are the city’s devout old men and women, outside the courthouse door in the frost.
Judge Khomyakova is also waiting for the dawn. Is she sleeping? What dreams does she see? Or is she awake?
Tatyana Pletnyova and Said Tangri demanded freedom for Yury DMITRIEV on 26 December 2021 in central Moscow.
They stood in front of the statue of Bulat Okudzhava, off Gorky Street.
On 27 December 2021, the Petrozavodsk City Court in Karelia will deliver its third verdict in the case of Yury DMITRIEV. The highest court in the land remains silent; lawyers from Memorial’s Human Rights Centre have submitted an appeal to the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg.
“Child Pornography”
The court in Karelia will be serving an “unprecedented” third judgement on issues thoroughly aired at Dmitriev’s two previous trials where he was twice acquitted of the self-same charges.
Yury Dmitriev and Victor Anufriev, March 2018
The republic’s High Court decided otherwise, quadrupling the sentence for sexual abuse of a minor, and returning the charges of child pornography and non-violent abuse to be considered a third time.
Dmitriev’s defence attorney Victor Anufriev has demonstrated, twice, that his client has no charge to answer. Meeting the accusations head on with testimony from a succession of experts, Anufriev has shown within the framework of current legislation and the procedures of the Russian judicial system that Yury DMITRIEV is innocent. If he is now convicted the decision will be based not on the rule of law or established procedure but on other extra-judicial criteria.
Much of the discussion in the first two cases, as journalist Nikita Girin showed, concerns the kind of photos and parental behaviour to be found in any family. So what has driven this relentless persecution? Earlier events and the timing of the last few days, as the Memorial Human Rights Centre and the Memorial Society themselves face liquidation by the courts, offer a further suggestion.
Pursuing a Loner
Dmitriev and the evidence against him “fit the bill” like none other.
Potential supporters in Russia, not to mention the West, would have second thoughts about anyone accused of “child pornography” or the “sexual abuse” of a minor – offences regarded in the West with a strong and barely rational horror.
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The Dmitriev Affair 