Russian rights activists concerned by fabrication of criminal cases

Interfax

A number of Russian lawyers and rights activists believe that the Russian law-enforcement agencies quite often instigate criminal cases against those who are not guilty.

“With [Hermitage Capital fund lawyer] Sergey Magnitskiy and [businesswoman] Vera Trifonova [who both died in remand centres] and in other cases it is provocation and there is not any mention of protecting citizens’ rights,” lawyer Vladimir Zherebenkov said at a news conference today at Interfax’s central office.

Lawyer Mikhail Trepashkin also agreed with him; in his opinion, “provocations and fabrications of criminal cases have become commonplace in Russia”.

As the most glaring example of this, in their opinion, they cited the case against Yelena Bazanova, deputy head of Moscow Region’s Serpukhovskiy municipal district, who is accused of receiving a large bribe.

“Provocation was carried out against Yelena Bazanova: a statement was signed by some Yusup Karimov. A criminal case was launched based on this statement; Bazanova was taken into custody without investigation,” rights activists Viktor Kamaldinov said at the Interfax news conference. [Passage omitted]

For his part, rights activist Igor Ogorodnikov said that he witnessed how law-enforcement employees, coming to detain Bazanova, “for more than three-four hours, virtually deprived her of the possibility of going to the toilet, for over an hour did not allow her lawyer access to her and then she spoke to him only in the presence of an employee of the law-enforcement agencies”. [Passage omitted]

In conclusion, the participants in the news conference said that they “have received a great number of appeals from all regions concerning the same fabricated cases – pseudo-victims, fake businessmen, operational actors (employees of the law-enforcement agencies)”. payday loan займ онлайн на карту без отказа www.zp-pdl.com https://zp-pdl.com/fast-and-easy-payday-loans-online.php займы на карту без отказа