The Southern District Military Court has concluded its hearing of the criminal case against Raisa Seroglazova, a native of the Kherson region, who was found guilty under the article concerning public calls to carry out terrorist activities. According to the prosecution, on 17 July 2023 she posted a comment calling for missile and bomb strikes on locations where Russian military personnel and equipment were stationed, including one of the checkpoints in Crimea. The 56-year-old woman was sentenced to five and a half years’ imprisonment. According to the press office of the FSB Directorate for the Republic of Crimea, the woman was living in Feodosia prior to her arrest.
The case revealed significant breaches of the principle of openness and transparency regarding the pronouncement of the sentence. On the official website, the date, time and place of the pronouncement were posted in the case file only after the court had delivered its verdict. Consequently, members of the public were deprived of the opportunity to find out in advance where and when the sentence would be pronounced. No information regarding the sentence was provided on the court’s website, and it only became known to the media at the initiative of the court’s press office.
Furthermore, the court has not disclosed the details of the text message containing linguistic and psychological indications of justifying terrorist acts, which makes it impossible to ascertain to what extent the words written by Seroglazova in her comments actually constituted an ‘acknowledgement that the ideology and practice of terrorism are correct and deserve support and emulation’. Nor is it possible to establish with certainty to what extent the woman’s comments 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 the Kherson region 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 involvement of Russian judge Arslan Zhaginov 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 national, and the other is the country of which the defendant is a national.
A coordinated campaign to report on the verdict in the Russian media is particularly noteworthy. At least four reports have been recorded across various media outlets, all of which cited the court’s press office as their sole source of information. No comments from Seroglazova herself or her lawyer were featured in any Russian media outlet.
This case provides further evidence to support the argument that the Russian judicial system ignores the reality of an international armed conflict. Ukraine’s legitimate and natural right to self-defence against military aggression by the Russian army is interpreted by the court as terrorist activity directed 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.
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