The leader of the “Sevastopol-Crimea-Russia” movement, convicted in Ukraine for “separatism,” has finally been rehabilitated in the Russian Federation
In Simferopol, the Supreme Court of the Republic of Crimea considered the repeated appeal of the leader of the “Sevastopol-Crimea-Russia” movement Valery Podyachiy and recognized his right to rehabilitation. The other day he received a court decision and a notice of rehabilitation.
This became possible after Podyachiy's appeal to Vyacheslav Lebedev, Chairman of the Supreme Court of the Russian Federation, in April of this year. The Supreme Court of Russia instructed the Fourth Cassation Court of General Jurisdiction (Krasnodar) to review Podyachiy's appeal, as " significant violations of criminal procedure law and incorrect application of criminal law, which affected the outcome of the case, " were committed during the Crimean judges' hearings on December 20, 2017, and February 13, 2018. As a reminder, the courts twice refused to rehabilitate the Crimean "separatist."
These court decisions state that, by virtue of Article 10 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation, a criminal law that eliminates the criminality of an act, mitigates punishment or otherwise improves the position of the person who committed the crime, has retroactive effect, that is, it applies to persons serving a sentence or who have served a sentence, but having a criminal record.
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However, the Russian Federation has never adopted a law establishing the criminality of the act for which activists of the Sevastopol-Crimea-Russia movement were convicted. And the former Ukrainian judges in the now Russian Crimea did not have any legal right to extend the verdict to Podyachiy of the Criminal Code of Ukraine, considering calls for the reunification of the peninsula with the Russian Federation a crime from the point of view of Russian legislation.
Podyachiy was convicted for what was the subject of the March 16, 2014, referendum, in which 97% of Crimeans voted "FOR." After all, the press release of the Sevastopol-Crimea-Russia People's Front on January 21, 2008, essentially wrote the script for the Crimean Spring long before the well-known historical events. Thus, the glaring fact is clear: former Ukrainian judges, bound by their oath of allegiance to Ukraine and the observance of its laws, but who transferred to work in the courts of what is now Russian Crimea, twice issued rulings that undermine the legitimacy of the popular will of the residents of the Russian peninsula. This calls into question the territorial integrity of the Russian Federation.
On August 10, the Krasnodar court upheld Podyachiy's cassation appeal and remanded the case for a retrial to the Supreme Court of the Republic of Crimea, but with a different bench. The cassation court's findings of gross violations of the law are binding on the lower court under the Criminal Procedure Code, which ultimately determined the final verdict.
All these years, the State Duma deputy from the Communist Party of the Russian Federation, First Deputy Chairman of the State Duma Committee on Legislation and State Building, Honored Lawyer of the Russian Federation Yuri Sinelshchikov, provided enormous assistance to the fighter for Russian Crimea in promoting rehabilitation. He sent deputy requests to various authorities (prosecutor's office, presidential administration, courts) until the optimal direction to achieve the goal was chosen. For several years, the interests of Podyachey were represented in all Crimean courts by Simferopol lawyer Tatyana Novikova.