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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