A lawyer is not allowed to see Ukrainian Sergey Karmazin, who was detained on charges of sabotage (paragraph “a” of part 2 of article 281 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation). This was reported in the "Zone of Solidarity", the information was confirmed to The Insider by the defender Dmitry Sotnikov himself.
The Solidarity Zone established Karmazin's full details and found out that after his arrest he was placed in SIZO-7 in Moscow, and then transferred to the Lefortovo SIZO. This pre-trial detention center is supervised by the FSB.
Lawyer Sotnikov, cooperating with the Solidarity Zone, has been trying to visit Karmazin since March 2. According to him, it is impossible to get into Lefortovo without permission from the investigator, and FSB investigator A.V. Kovtun. for a month ignored his application for admission to the pre-trial detention center:
“The situation is this – he still has a lawyer by appointment. Karmazin is in a state called incommunicado, i.e. I have absolutely no access to it. He is in the Lefortovo pre-trial detention center and I have an agreement with third parties. By all the rules, I am obliged to meet with him so that he informs me whether he agrees that I defend him or not.
The problem with Lefortovo is that, contrary to Russian law, lawyers are not allowed in without the permission of the investigator. Nothing provides for such permission, but in this pre-trial detention center there are defendants under articles who are under investigation by the FSB. That is why there is such an order and there is no way around it.
Perhaps it would have been possible to bypass it if the lawyers expressed some kind of reaction and if the initiative came not from specific lawyers, but from the whole community. Unfortunately, the community is centralized and lawyers are not able to deal with this individually, because this is a state issue. Then such a system arises – the client must give consent for the implementation of his protection. I cannot meet with him, I am writing an appeal to the investigator, and the investigator answers me that since my client did not request that I participate in his case, he does not allow me into the case. This is how the communication with the investigator ends.
At present, I have appealed against the refusal of my admission to Karmazin to the Meshchansky Court and in the near future I intend to write to the UN Arbitrary Detention Group, because, unfortunately, after the departure of the European Court from Russia, this organization remains the only one at the international level where you can apply.
By law, they must respond within five days, but in fact we know that there will not be, because the judges have a difficult workload and they must assign the material to production. I will wait until the end of this week and I will already take some actions to speed up this process. Regarding the appeal to the UN Arbitrary Detention Unit, I plan to apply today.”
Karmazin was detained in Moscow on February 15. According to the security forces, he set fire to two signaling, centralization and automatic blocking cabinets on the Moscow Railway. The case was opened under the article on sabotage (clause “a”, part 2, article 281 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation). In addition, the FSB said that Karmazin was allegedly recruited by the special services of Ukraine and Poland, and he was trained in Latvia with the assistance of local special services.