Friday, July 10, 2020

Russian Court Admits Error in Ingush Activist’s Case But Illegally Extends Her Detention to September 25


Paul Goble

            Staunton, July 9 – Three days ago, an appeals court in the Russian city of Pyatigorsk ruled that an earlier extension of the detention of Zarifa Sautiyeva, an Ingush activist who has been identified as a political prisoner by Memorial, was illegal but than turned around and denied all other appeals by her lawyers and extended her detention again to September 25. 

            That the court acknowledged the earlier error is significant, her lawyers say, because Russian courts up to now have not been willing to acknowledge that they are violating Russian laws in this case. But the extension of her detention shows they have no intention of changing their behavior (fortanga.org/2020/07/zarifa-sautieva-ostayotsya-pod-strazhej-do-25-sentyabrya-v-narushenie-zakona/).

            The earlier extension the Pyatigorsk court said was illegal covered the period from September 9 to December 11, 2019, according to Sautiiyev’a lawyer, Biland Dzugayev. The only female detainee from the March 2019 protests was arrested on July 12, 2019, and has seen her detention extended by the courts extended every time prosecutors have asked for it.

            In fact, Dzugayev says, the court acted just as illegally this week as it did in September 2019 but refuses to recognize that fact.  Instead, the judges are again deferring to investigators and prosecutors whose chief goal, it is now clear, is to keep leaders like Sautiyeva behind bars so that cases against them and their ties to Ingush communities can be invented. 

            The lawyer continues that the courts and prosecutors seem particularly interested in linking Sautiyeva to human rights groups, implicitly suggesting that anyone who cooperates with them is guilty of a crime, and to the teips, the basic family-clan structure everyone in Ingush society is by virtue of birth part of.

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