The Southern District Military Court has concluded its hearing of the criminal case against Nikolai Semiletov, a 50-year-old resident of the village of Izumrodnoye in the Dzhankoy district, who was found guilty of ten counts of publicly inciting terrorist activity and four counts of inciting extremism. In total, the court sentenced him to four years’ imprisonment in a general-regime prison, as well as a ban on posting material online for one and a half years. According to the prosecution, Semiletov posted publicly accessible text comments on Ukrainian Telegram channels, in which he called for the destruction of the Crimean Bridge, as well as for the killing of Russians and political figures.
The case was marred by significant breaches of the principles of openness and public access, both during the trial and at the pronouncement of the sentence. In particular, information about the defendant and the parties to the case was completely concealed on the official website. Furthermore, the date, time and place of the sentencing were published only after the court had delivered its verdict. For the week leading up to this, the information on the case file had not been updated. Consequently, members of the public were deprived of the opportunity to find out in advance the time and place of the sentencing. No information regarding the sentence was provided on the court’s website, and it only became known to the media following an initiative by the press office of the Federal Security Service (FSB) for the Republic of Crimea and Sevastopol.
Furthermore, nothing is known about the content of the text comments, which allegedly contain linguistic and psychological indicators of justifying terrorist acts and inciting violence against a group of people on the basis of specific characteristics. This makes it impossible to ascertain to what extent the words written by Semiletov in the comments actually concerned ‘acknowledging the ideology and practice of terrorism as correct, deserving of support and emulation’, as well as calls for extremist activity. Nor is it possible to establish with certainty to what extent the comments made by the man from Dzhankoy were related to an analysis of causes or historical events.
Particular attention is drawn to the fact that the criminal case against a resident of the occupied territory of Crimea was not heard in a court in the occupied territory, as required by international humanitarian law, but in the Southern District Military Court, which is located in Rostov-on-Don, Russia. The participation of Russian judge Ilya Bezgub in the proceedings calls into question the independence and impartiality of the court, as the case concerns the public expression of an opinion on an armed conflict in which one party is the country of which the judge is a citizen, and the other is the country of which the defendant is a citizen.
What is striking is the coordinated campaign to report on the verdict in the Russian media. At least five articles have been identified across various media outlets, all of which cited the FSB press office as their sole source of information, and only on the day following the actual pronouncement of the verdict. No comments from Semiletov himself or his lawyer regarding the trial and the verdict were featured in any Russian media outlet. At the same time, with the aim of manipulation, some Russian media outlets included footage of Semiletov’s confessions made during the investigation in their reports.
This case provides further evidence of the claim that the Russian judicial system ignores the reality of an international armed conflict. Calls for and endorsement of Ukraine’s legitimate and natural right to self-defence against military aggression by the Russian army are interpreted by the court as calls for terrorist and extremist activities against the Russian state. Such an interpretation contradicts international understandings of terrorism, as enshrined in the Shanghai Convention.
The practice of disregarding international armed conflict is described in detail in the joint study ‘Denial of the Right to a Fair Trial as an International Crime during Russia’s War against Ukraine: Context, Practice, Law and Prospects’, which provides well-reasoned evidence that such prosecutions are aimed at justifying military aggression against Ukraine. Furthermore, the study ‘Peculiarities of the Prosecution of Residents of Occupied Territories under Terrorism-Related Articles’ established that, over a 10-month period last year, the Southern District Military Court heard at least 14 cases concerning the justification of terrorism against residents of Crimea. In not a single case were the texts of the statements provided for an independent analysis of their compliance with the criteria for justifying terrorism.