Moscow’s Shift of Trials of Protesters Out of Ingushetia Shows It Views Republic’s Residents as ‘Primitives,’ Lawyer Says

Paul Goble

            Staunton, November 21 –Aleksey Miroshnichenko, a lawyer for some of the Ingush protesters still under detention, says that Moscow’s decision to move the trials of his clients out of Ingushetia shows that the center views Ingush residents not as full-fledged Russian citizens but as backward “primitives” (kavkaz-uzel.eu/articles/342627/).

           

            His observation came in the course of a Moscow press conference organized by the Memorial Human Rights Organization during which other lawyers said the approach of Moscow and Magas had violated the rights of Ingush from the beginning. Not only was the suppression of the March 2019 protests illegal but those detained have been mistreated ever since.

            They have been shifted from place to place beyond the borders of the republic, were being held on invented charges, had their contacts with attorneys restricted, not been informed of legal decisions, and had their appeals ignored most of the time.  In the words of one lawyer taking part, the system had demonstrated its “legal nihilism” throughout.

            The officials’ approach has been intended to decapitate the Ingush protest movement and effectively end it. But two activists, Magomed Mutsolgov and Izabella Yevloyev, says the plans of the authorities have failed and that the Ingush people will return to the streets when they judge that to be a necessary and effective tactic (kavkaz-uzel.eu/articles/342586/).

            Meanwhile, Magomed Aushev, a lawyer for Rashid Maysigov who was recently released from a detention center but remains under house arrest, cautions against drawing parallels between his case and that of “the Golunov affair” in Moscow. Ivan Golunov was released almost overnight; Maysigov was detained for five months (kavkazr.com/a/30283968.html).

            Lawyers have filed a complaint against an Ingush court decision to drop the investigation into three Ingush deputies the lawyers and others say took part in the falsification of the vote approving the September 2018 border deal that gave Chechnya 26,000 hectares of Ingush land (fortanga.org/2019/11/advokat-magomed-bekov-napravil-zhalobu-ob-otmene-postanovleniya-ob-otkaze-v-vozbuzhdenii-ugolovnogo-dela-v-otnoshenii-deputatov-narodnogo-sobraniya/).

            And in an another indication that the judicial authorities can move with dispatch to defend the authorities but not the people, a court in Kirov Oblast released a former Ingush interior ministry official well in advance of the completion of his sentence for engaging in torture against prisoners because his jailors said he had been “rehabilitated” (doshdu.com/iz-kolonii-dosrochno-vypustili-osuzhdennogo-po-delu-o-pytkah-v-cpje-mvd-ingushetii/).