A corresponding decision has been delivered by the Sovietsky district court of Nizhny Novgorod which has found that the police was acting unlawfully when it detained Chairman of INGO “Committee Against Torture” Igor Kalyapin in the park in Svoboda Square and took him to the police station on March 31, 2011. 

Such judgments are rather rare because courts tend to stick to the position of law enforcers who prefer to detain both unauthorized rally participants and passers-by and bring them to administrative liability without exception. In our country almost every opposition rally is dispersed by the police and accompanied by massive detentions of both direct rally participants and observers, irrespective of presence or absence of legal grounds for detention.