Opinion I am proud to have spoken out against Putin’s crimes in Ukraine
Instead, he sent the court the following written statement:
For the first time in my life, I am addressing the Supreme Court. This body has performed different functions in different periods of our country’s history: There was a time when it approved convictions for countless innocent victims, sending them to camps and firing squads; later, it overturned these same sentences for lack of grounds and issued decisions on rehabilitation. Today, we are back in the first of these two phases — but we should not doubt that the second one is sure to come.
In its essence, cassation is a purely legal procedure, and our cassation appeal cites a number of undisputed legal irregularities, each of which would be enough on its own to overturn my conviction. I could write a great deal more about these irregularities. I could address the issue that this entire case essentially lacks any grounds or specific crime, because I was convicted solely for publicly expressing my opposition to the Putin regime and the war in Ukraine — that is, for exercising my constitutional right to freedom of speech. Or I could make the point that the text of the same articles of the Criminal Code according to which I received my 25-year sentence directly contradicts Russia’s international human rights obligations, rendering my conviction invalid by virtue of Section 4 of Article 15 of the Constitution. This is not merely my opinion; it is an official finding of the U.N. Human Rights Committee.
Or I could write about the fact that my sentence was imposed by a court of illegal composition, since the presiding judge faced an obvious conflict of interest: He was personally subject to international sanctions under the Magnitsky Act, which I helped to implement. This, of course, was organized deliberately and demonstratively. There is much more I could write about.
But I will not take up paper and your time with this argument. First of all, because you, professional lawyers, understand it all perfectly well — and it will have no effect on the decision you will put your signatures to. Secondly, because it is strange and rather ridiculous to provide examples of the illegality in a case that is illegal from beginning to end — just as the cases of all Russian citizens arrested for speaking out against the war are illegal from beginning to end. And, finally, because any arguments based on law have no relevance to the reality in which Russia exists under the regime of Vladimir Putin.
This reality was once described with startling, frightening accuracy by George Orwell in his great novel “1984”: “War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is power.” This slogan on the facade of Orwell’s Ministry of Truth very accurately reflects the principle of functioning of today’s Russian government.
For the third year now, my country — or, more precisely, an aging, irremovable, illegitimate dictator who has arrogated to himself the right to speak and act on behalf of my country — has been waging a brutal, unjust, invasive war against a neighboring independent state. In the course of this aggression, the invader has committed genuine war crimes. In two years, tens of thousands of civilians, including children, have been killed and wounded in Ukraine; thousands of residential houses as well as hundreds of hospitals and schools have been destroyed. These facts are common knowledge and have been documented in detail in the reports of international organizations. It was on suspicion of war crimes that the International Criminal Court issued an arrest warrant for citizen Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin.
But in our Orwellian reality, the law enforcement and judicial system is not interested in those who commit war crimes but in those who speak out about them, who try to stop them. Today, there are dozens of people in Russian prisons and penal colonies who have openly spoken out against the war in Ukraine. These are very different people: artists and priests, politicians and journalists, lawyers and police officers, scholars and entrepreneurs, students and pensioners — people of different views, ages and professions who did not want to become silent accomplices to the crimes of the current Russian authorities. Today, it is common in the world to berate and condemn all Russian citizens, without distinction, to say that we are all responsible for this war. But I am proud that in this dark, despicable, terrible time in Russia, there have been so many people who were not afraid and did not remain silent — even at the cost of their own freedom.
This whole case is based on the denial of the very concepts of law, justice, legality. But it is also based on a crude, cynical forgery — an attempt to equate criticism of the authorities with harm to the country; to present opposition activity as “treason.” But there is nothing new in this, either; it is what every dictatorship does. In Nazi Germany, anti-fascist students from the White Rose movement were tried for “treason”; in apartheid South Africa, civil rights activists were prosecuted for the same crime. In the Soviet Union, one of our greatest compatriots, Nobel Prize laureate Alexander Solzhenitsyn, was also charged with “treason.”
History has set everything right — has it not?
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