Press Release, 16.07.2014

The court hearing on Evgeny Vitishko case was postponed till August 4 since the Tambov penal colony settlement No 2 didn’t manage to provide conference communication with Vitishko. YABLOKO leader Sergei Mitrokhin who arrived at the court hearing announced about this.

Mikhail Savva, Vladimir Ryzhayev, Sergei Mitrokhin

Evgeny Vitishko’s lawyer Marina Dubrovina said that the authorities of the colony were informed about the court hearing on July 3 but they didn’t manage to find a computer with the Internet access within 13 days. In connection with this the session lasted for only two minutes.

The court had to consider the cassational representation of the deputy prosecutor of the Krasnodar Territory and the cassational appeal of Vitishko’s lawyer on the repeal of the judgement on the change of the suspended sentence to a real prison term.

Sergei Mitrokhin, Mikhail Savva and Elena Shmakova

Sergei Mitrokhin expects that the only correct decision in terms of law will be taken on August 4. “There are no grounds both for keeping Evgeny Vitishko in custody or for a sentence itself which was passed to vitishko earlier. We should keep on struggling for freedom to the innocent person”, said the politician.

The former political prisoner Mikhail Savva, activists of the Environmental Watch on North Caucasus, YABLOKO and civil activists of the Krasnodar Territory came to the court hearing.

Evgeny Vitishko and Suren Gazaryan are the ecologists who were charged with three years on probation for supposedly spray-painting “Alexander is a thief”, “This is our forest” on the unlawfully built fence of Governor of the Krasnodar Territory. This way the environmental activists expressed disagreement with the illegal construction of a fence in a natural reservation near the Black Sea.

Later Vitishko’s punishment was replaced by a real term in a penal colony settlement. Suren Gazaryan was forced to leave the country.

See also:
Sergei Mitrokhin visited ecologist Evgeny Vitishko at Tambov colony
A true Hero of Russia
European liberals deplore imprisonment Russian environmentalist