The Tagansky District Court of Moscow has sentenced Pavel Ivanov, a former deputy of the Basmanny District of the capital from the Communist Party of the Russian Federation, to five days of arrest. As specified in Ivanov's Telegram channel, a protocol was drawn up against him for demonstrating extremist symbols (Part 1 of Article 20.3 of the Code of Administrative Offenses).
The former deputy’s lawyer told RusNews and SotaVision that the reason for administrative prosecution was a photo published on Ivanov’s Telegram channel in August 2021. On it, security forces found a hand-drawn logo of Alexei Navalny's project «Smart voting».
The defense insisted that the court has no evidence that the telegram channel belongs to Ivanov. The former deputy himself did not admit his guilt.
At the end of May, the Ministry of Justice added Ivanov to its register of “foreign agents.” In this regard, he was deprived of his powers as a municipal deputy, and on June 14 he responded by going on a hunger strike, which he stopped 13 days later. At the trial, Ivanov said that he could not be in a special detention center for health reasons.
The Smart Voting logo is not on the list of extremist materials. Despite this, when cases began to be filed against activists for posts about the project, one of the protocols mentioned a study by the Center for the Promotion of Humanitarian Expertise “Independent Expert”. According to him, the red exclamation point in the white square has “an identical resemblance and represents the symbols of an extremist organization: the Navalny Headquarters social movement.”