The Pskov City Court recognized as legal the inclusion of the chairman of the local branch of Yabloko, Lev Shlosberg, in the register of “foreign agents,” accepting the Ministry of Justice’s allegations that the politician was under the “influence of other persons.” Schlosberg spoke about this in his Telegram channel.
“We received all the confirmation that the only basis for including me in the register of “foreign agents” was is my legitimate political activity. Thus, the response to precisely this activity was the violation of my constitutional rights,” the politician wrote.
In total, four court hearings took place between July 6 and September 8, during which lawyers Anton Golubev and Vitaly Isakov and Maxim Olenichev asked the Ministry of Justice to provide evidence of “foreign influence” on Schlosberg.
According to him, the department refused to provide the court with most of the documents requested by the plaintiffs. At the same time, the “main body of documents” of the Ministry of Justice consisted of more than a dozen decisions on claims of other people who challenged their inclusion in the register of “foreign agents,” the politician added.
A representative of the Ministry of Justice, who participated in the meetings, confirmed that Shlosberg, nine out of ten “foreign sources” of influence provided for in Article 3 of the Federal Law “On control over the activities of persons under foreign influence” have not been identified. The last, tenth, paragraph talks about the influence on a person of other persons who are influenced by the persons specified in the first nine paragraphs of the article.
The Ministry of Justice declared Shlosberg a “foreign agent” in June of this year. The politician, according to the ministry, spoke out against the invasion of Ukraine and took part in “the creation and dissemination of information materials of foreign agents to an unlimited number of people.”