The Third Court of Appeal in Sochi dismissed lawyer Mikhail Benyash from defending three members of the National Guard who were fired because they refused to go to war in Ukraine. He writes about it himself.
The reason was that he had the status of a «foreign agent». The press service of the court wrote on December 13 that Benyash could not participate in the process, the materials of which contain state secrets. The Judicial Collegium, in making this decision, relied on the Law “On Control over the Activities of Persons Under Foreign Influence” dated July 14, 2022.
According to Benyash, the National Guard really believes that the case “contains a state secret.” However, he managed to get acquainted with all the documents before the end of October, when the Ministry of Justice recognized him as a “foreign agent”.
The day before it became known that the Ministry of Justice also demanded to deprive Benyash of the status of a lawyer because of the posts in his Telegram channel.
The Benyash case. Could one lawyer bite two policemen