Head of the Moscow branch of the Committee Against Torture Anastasia Garina:

“For over a year now we have been fighting with state authorities on whether the crime reports submitted by the opposition members shall be checked. The thing is, the Tverskoy Investigative Department thinks that they shall not. That’s what they wrote in the official response: it is clear from the report that this Dmitry Baturo of yours participated in the protest rally, which means he is an opposition member, which means no police officers beat him up – he is intentionally lying to defame our valiant guardians of order. I quoted this response here one of these days.

We, certainly, disagreed: how can you know if the person is lying or not if you NEVER CHECKED this information?

Then there were thirteen months of applications and court hearings. As a rule, they tried not to accept these applications of ours, when they could (since it was clear what the application was about, who would want to deal with that? “Not in my shift”, in general) and we appealed against their refusal to accept those.

As a result, the Moscow City Court in the end obliged the Tverskoy Court to define whether the investigators shall check the crime reports or not. The Tverskoy Court sighed and passed the ruling today: they shall not. Meaning, not obliged to. See the picture for the justification.

I can certify with full responsibility that the data contained in the crime report was complete and sufficient. And in order to prove it I can forward this crime report to everyone who wants to familiarize with it.

It’s not about the data – it’s about the issue about which the Tverskoy Investigative Department previously wrote quite openly: “crime reports submitted by opposition shall not be checked”. Even if they are eaten alive by the cops in the police front office, no one would not check this information even, let alone initiate a criminal case. People should not be stirred up and the investigators should not be distracted from important things: they still need to write essays to their superiors about the importance of their profession and sing songs about football in video clips.

Well, we will appeal against it. We submitted 26 applications on Baturo’s case, now it will be the 27th. Denis Iskhakov and Georgiy Ivanov were working”.