Appeal court tightens verdict to rights defender Igor Nagavkin

After considering the appeal complaints, the Volgograd Regional Court has replaced the conditional two-year freedom deprivation term appointed to Igor Nagavkin, a human rights defender, for a real one. Nagavkin treats the decision as unfair and intends to challenge it.

The "Caucasian Knot" has reported that the Prosecutor's Office had appealed against the sentence passed to Nagavkin, treating it as "extremely lenient." On June 26, 2024, he was found guilty of disrupting the work of the SIZO (pre-trial prison) during the incident on May 15, 2023. Then, he was placed into a cell with those accused under the article on sexual acts against minors. He expressed his protest by smashing the furniture in the cell and squabbling with the wardens, who treated Nagavkin's words as a threat to their lives and health.

In his appeal complaint, Nagavkin noted the expert's unprofessionalism and subjectivity. He also listed a number of procedural violations committed by the expert and her bosses.

Nagavkin filed a motion to appoint a repeated linguistic examination with the involvement of other experts, but the judge rejected the motion.

Valentin Bogdan, the executive director of the Fund for the Protection of Prisoners' Rights*, has noted a negative trend in the work of the Russian Public Prosecutor's Office (PPO). If a judge issues an acquittal, the PPO later starts looking for some dirt on the judge, "opens a dossier" and often "opens a case about the judge's corruption."

Sergey Ivaschenko, a lawyer, has called Nagavkin's trial a customized one. "The PPO decided to put the human rights defender in jail; and it used all its instruments of pressure on the court, and perhaps earlier on investigators, so that Nagavkin would receive a real prison term," the lawyer was indignant.

*Included by the Russian Ministry of Justice (MoJ) into the register of foreign agents.