Press Release, February 5, 2014

Today the Leninsky District Court of Krasnodar arrested YABLOKO activist Igor Kharchenko for five days under Article 19.3 of the Administrative Code (Disobedience to a lawful order of a police officer). The trial was held behind closed doors, and the sentence was made within a few minutes. Igor Kharchenko was not even given word. He was also deprived of a lawyer who would help in defence and was not allowed to attach to a video to the case file. The video demonstrated too well that there was no any “disobedience to a lawful order of a police officer”, and that there had been no reason to detain Kharchenko.

Kharchenko was brutally detained by police near the Krasnodar office of the YABLOKO party yesterday at 6 p.m. Before that, his car windows were smashed and tires slashed by unknown persons who operated closely with the police: an outdoor surveillance camera showed that a few minutes before the unknown began crushing the car, two traffic police officers approached the car, spoke on the phone and left.

A few minutes after the act of vandalism, when party activists ran out of the office to the car, several tolice officers emerged at the scene without being called. Two of them without any reason came to Igor Kharchenko and handcuffed him. Igor was taken to the police department. Several party activists went to that police department too so that to testify that Kharchenko had not commit any illegal acts and had been arrested without any reason. However, Igor Kharchenko was not released. The police filed a protocol on committing an administrative offense under Article 19.3 of the Administrative Code (“Disobedience to a lawful order of a police officer”), then put Kharchenko into a cell of the Detention Prison of the Police Division for the Western District of Krasnodar.

On February 3, YABLOKO members Igor Kharchenko and Olga Soldatova were detained by police near the village Novotitarovskaya by Krasnodar. They were stopped by police when leaving a gas station under a pretext that Kharchenko “was driving his vehicle in an inadequate manner”, however, they were released and let go further.

Earlier famous ecologist Evgeny Vitishko was convinced for 15 days of imprisonment.