This portrait of Yury DMITRIEV was recently produced by the artist Boris Zhutovsky.
DMITRIEV has been in custody since December 2016, with only a brief period of liberty from January to June 2018 when he was allowed to live at home but not to leave Petrozavodsk.
The portrait was evidently created from photos of the researcher since DMITRIEV was little known in the rest of Russia before his first trial from June 2017 to April 2018.
“Today I took a parcel to my father and collected all your letters,” writes Katya Klodt. “There were so many of them! Thank you very much.”
Yury DMITRIEV will mark his 66th birthday at Karelia’s Detention Centre No 1 in Petrozavodsk on Friday, 28 January this year.
Yury DMITRIEV, b. 1956
(his daughter Katya can be seen behind him)
Photo from Inside Story, 13 January 2022
“Ο φύλακας της ρωσικής μνήμης που ζει σε σωφρονιστική αποικία”
When will the verdict in the Dmitriev case come into force? (and the rulings about International Memorial and the Memorial Human Rights Centre)
In posts issued, respectively, on 12 January (“What Next?” [R]) and 14 January 2022 (“What we are doing” [R]), the two Memorial organisations described what lies ahead and how they are coping at present. In the first the Memorial legal team stated that the clock starts ticking once the ruling has been received in written form. Then the accused and their attorneys have a calendar month in which to appeal.
Meanwhile, the European Court in Strasbourg issued an “interim measure” on 29 December 2021 (see text below).
Text of the 29 December 2021 ECtHR interim measure
*
As concerns DMITRIEV his attorney has already submitted an appeal on 27 December 2021, the day of the verdict. This was because the proceedings at the third trial, unlike its two predecessors, were clearly biased in favour of the prosecution. For example, not one of the petitions submitted by Victor Anufriev was accepted.
Until the rulings issued on 28-29 December 2021 come into force, neither International Memorial nor the Memorial Human Rights Centre (HRC) has been dissolved. The interval between the verdict and its implementation allows, as always, an opportunity for the accused to appeal.
In Petrozavodsk, for instance, the City Court announced on 10 January that it had received Victor Anufriev’s appeal against the way in which his client Yury DMITRIEV was convicted on 27 December and sentenced to 15 years in a strict-regime penal colony.
*
There have been international protests over the threatened closure of Memorial.
On 29 December, the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg, acting with uncharacteristic speed, applied an emergency interim measure, ordering the Russian government (since 1998 a co-signatory of the European Convention on Human Rights) to halt the abolition of the two organisations.
At 11 pm on 31 December 2021, the foreign ministry of the European Union released a statement supported by the United States, the 27-member European Union, Australia, Canada and the United Kingdom calling on Russia “to uphold its international human rights obligations and commitments“.
*
As of mid-January 2022, the “Hands off Memorial!” petition had attracted 141,415 signatories worldwide. The text is presently available in 13 languages: Russian, Ukrainian, Belorussian, Polish, Estonian, Latvian, Czech and Hebrew; English, French, German, Italian and Spanish.
The Dmitriev Affair 