I was just watching this and laughing: they’re leading a guy into the police van with me... IN A TOP HAT. I didn’t even notice it at the time, or maybe I’d just forgotten.
What sent me back to these videos was a letter from the European Court this morning: on February 2, rulings will be announced on six of my complaints about unlawful detentions and arrests.
Case 29580/12 — Detention and arrest during the public festivities on May 9, 2012.
2–3) Case 11252/13 — This case includes two complaints over detentions and fines. Also related to the public festivities in May 2012.
One complaint: https://roseurosud.org/novosti/v-espch-obzhalovano-ocherednoe-zaderzhanie-navalnogo The second: https://roseurosud.org/novosti/podali-zhalobu-v-espch-na-zaderzhanie-8-maya-2012-goda
Between May 6 and 9, I was detained about six times altogether. This snapshot by future Pulitzer Prize winner Sergey Ponomarev perfectly captures how I was spending most of my time back then:
Case 36847/12 — The dispersal of the rally on March 5, 2012.
This is what we remember as the “fountain at Pushkinskaya” (Pushkinskaya Square in Moscow). The ruling here is the one I’m most interested to see.
6) Two arrests on February 24, 2014, the day the first verdict was handed down in the “Bolotnaya case” (the prosecution of protesters over the 2012 Bolotnaya Square rally).
Both were absolutely magnificent.
Here you can watch me (according to police witness testimony) shouting slogans, organizing the crowd, and resisting officers during the first detention:
This one is even better. Here, “the case materials establish that Navalny chanted, shouted slogans, obstructed pedestrians, and actively resisted arrest.” For that, I was jailed for 7 days and then placed under house arrest.
Why am I bringing all this up? Of course, I don’t know what the rulings will be, but I believe the ECHR will examine these cases fairly, and any unbiased person can see perfectly well what happened here.
In every case, there is a judge. In some, there are prosecutors. In all of them, there are police officers who carried out unlawful detentions, then filed falsified reports, and then went on to give false testimony in court. All of them have superiors who issued unlawful orders and instructions.
None of them need to be lustrated — they committed serious crimes under the current Criminal Code. We’ll just abolish the statute of limitations for politically motivated crimes, and that’s that. After that, as Grishchenko in *The Green Van* (a Soviet novel/film) put it: maybe liquidation, maybe reformation.
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