NEWS

Court Rules for Rights Group

By Galina Stolyarova

Staff Writer

The Dzerzhinsky District Court on Tuesday ruled in favor of the Memorial human rights group and declared the Dec. 4 police raid on the organization’s local headquarters at 23 Ulitsa Rubinshteina illegitimate.

On Dec. 4, a group of armed and masked men who claimed to have been sent by the local Prosecutor’s office raided the local headquarters of the Memorial human rights group, confiscating eleven hard drives from the group’s computers. The investigators also seized all the organization’s research and archive materials collated over the past 20 years.

Several masked men armed with sticks stormed into Memorial’s office at around 1 p.m. and began searching the premises. All staff were forced to take their seats and were forbidden from making or receiving calls or communicating in any other way with the outside world.

Arseny Roginsky, chairman of the board of the Moscow-based international organization Memorial, said the verdict marked a rare case of an independent and fair trial in Russia.

“I find it encouraging that the judge gave an unbiased verdict that was clearly against the interests of our powerful opponents who represent the law enforcement agencies,” Roginsky said.

“Instead of protecting and placating the investigators — which is what, regrettably, most Russian judges would have done, as can be seen in similar trials — the court came out with a fair verdict.”

The investigators denounced the verdict and said they would appeal the ruling at the St. Petersburg City Court.

The court ruled that all the documents and hard drives taken by the investigators during the search must be returned to Memorial, but the human rights activists will have to wait until the end of the legal proceedings, when a ruling is given on the appeal.

Irina Flige, head of the organization’s historical branch said the investigators’ protests were both predictable and pointless.

“The investigators claimed they never heard our lawyer ringing the doorbell and banging on the door,” she said. “But a video recording – which, remarkably enough, they themselves submitted and screened at the court – proved that the sounds were perfectly audible.”

Human rights lawyer Ivan Pavlov who represents Memorial said the organization is planning to sue Anvar Azimov, Russia’s representative at the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE), who, speaking at a session on Jan. 18, claimed the Russian authorities had sufficient reason to believe that Memorial was linked to the funding of extremist materials that were published in the Novy Peterburg newspaper.

According to the Investigative Committee of the Russian General Prosecutor’s Office, the search was part of an investigation into a criminal case involving the publication of “Here Comes the Real Candidate,” an article by Konstantin Chernyayev printed in the Novy Peterburg newspaper in June 2007.

The prosecutors allege that the article incited social and ethnic hatred.

“The very idea of a possible connection between Memorial, an internationally known human rights group, and extremists of any kind, is false; worse, when voiced publicly, it becomes a clear case of libel and an intentional attempt to discredit,” Pavlov said. “The search, and the rough, arbitrary manner in which it was carried out, created suitable grounds for such base speculations and insinuations.”

Investigator Mikhail Kalganov explained to the court during the hearings on Friday that he had reason to suspect that the editors of Novy Peterburg might have used Memorial’s office to hide sensitive documents related to the case.

Memorial’s staff argued that the evidence collected during the surveillance operation cited by Kalganov had either been concocted to order with an eye to intimidating the organization, or was unreliable.

The raid on Memorial’s office and the allegations about a possible extremist connection sent a shock wave through the international human rights community.

Ulrika Sundberg, an aide to Thomas Hammarberg, the Commissioner for Human Rights for the Council of Europe’s Parliamentary Assembly, attended the hearings in St. Petersburg and held a meeting at the Prosecutor General’s Office in Moscow to discuss the issue and subsequently reported on the trial to the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe.

Sundberg had earlier tried to secure a meeting with the city prosecutor Sergei Zaitsev but her request was turned down.

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