The Moscow City Court has considered an appeal against the extension of the arrest of SOTAvision journalist Antonina Favorskaya in the case of cooperation with the FBK (part 2 of article 282.1 of the Criminal Code) and left her under arrest. This was reported by a Mediazona correspondent from the courtroom.
20 people came to support Antonina Favorskaya in court, including Ilya Yashin’s parents Tatyana and Valery and oppositionist Nikolai Lyaskin. The hearing was held behind closed doors, Favorskaya participated in it via video conferencing and saw the support group only during the announcement of the decision.
Before the announcement, the journalist was unable to address the audience and the press — the sound on the screen in the courtroom was turned off, as soon as Favorskaya began to speak.
The sound was turned on only at the moment of announcement, so that Antonina Favorskaya could answer the judge whether she understood the decision. «Thank you for coming. They are so afraid! — the journalist manages to say goodbye to those who came to support her.
After the meeting, lawyer Evgenia Grigorieva said that in the pre-trial detention center Antonina Favorskaya goes to the gym, and also that she was transferred to another cell — previously her cellmates were accused under the article on drugs (228 of the Criminal Code), now the journalist is in a cell with defendants in other cases about extremism.
On March 29, Favorskaya was arrested on charges of participating in the activities of an “extremist community.” According to the press service of the Moscow courts, the journalist is charged with “collecting material, producing and editing videos and publications for FBK.” Favorskaya herself, when she was taken out of the courtroom, managed to shout: “They are trying me for an article about how the Federal Penitentiary Service tortured Alexei Navalny!”
In the pre-trial detention center, Favorskaya was registered as “professing extremism.”< /p>
In the first months after the arrest, the investigator did not give the journalist permission to call or visit her family. Only after lawyer Fyodor Sirosh filed a complaint with the court against the investigator’s actions were Favorskaya’s mother and grandmother allowed to communicate with Antonina for the first time.
After this, it became known that the investigation removed lawyer Fyodor Sirosh from Favorskaya’s case. As Mediazona learned, the investigation motivated the recusal by the fact that Fyodor Sirosh had previously been present as a defense attorney at the interrogation of one of the witnesses in the FBK case, and the investigation considers this a conflict of interest.
The resolution on the recusal of Fyodor Sirosh states, that this decision of the investigation is connected with the interrogation of Navalny’s team lawyer Evgeny Zamyatin in 2019 in the case of money laundering (clause “b” of part 4 of Article 174 of the Criminal Code), in which Sirosh participated as a defense attorney.