On 20 April 2023, Zavyalov District Court in Udmuriya extended the pre-trial detention of human rights defender and lawyer Dmitry Talantov until 26 June 2023. The human rights defender has been in detention since September 2022. He is being targeted for his Facebook posts against the Russian full-scale invasion of Ukraine as well as for incitement of hatered. The human rights lawyer faces up to 15 years in prison.
Dmitry Talantov is a human rights lawyer and president of the Bar Association of the Udmurtia region. He is the acting lawyer for Ivan Safronov, a journalist and RosCosmos official, on trial for a politically motivated high-treason charge. Dmitry Talantov started acting as Ivan Safronov’s lawyer in August 2021, after Ivan Safronov’s previous attorney, human rights defender and lawyer Ivan Pavlov faced persecution and threats of disbarment because of his legal work on the case. Dmitry Talantov has been targeted since he started to represent Ivan Safronov.
On 20 April 2023, Zavyalov District Court in Udmuriya extended the pre-trial detention for human rights defender and lawyer Dmitry Talantov until 26 June 2023. The human rights lawyer was transferred to Udmurtiya Pre-Trial Detention Center #1 on 28 January 2023, after his lawyers successfully secured that his case would be tried in Izhevsk, Udmurtiya months previous, in November 2022 once the investigative activities in Moscow were finalised on 18 October 2022. The defence lawyers argued that since the investigation established that Dmitry Talantov committed his so-called crimes (publishing social media posts) while residing in his country house near Izhevsk, he should be tried in Udmurtiya, not in Moscow.
On 20 January 2023, the Council of the Bar Association of Udmurtya removed human rigths defender Dmirty Talantov as the President of the regional Bar Association and elected a new president. In response, Dmitry Talantov published a statement, saying that while he understands the precarity of his position in the pre-trial detention, he expected more solidarity and transparency on the side of the Bar Association. The human rights lawyer expressed disappointment about the growing lack of independence of the Bar Association from the Russian government.
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https://www.rferl.org/a/russia-lawyer-pretrial-detention-extended-ukraine-war/32373642.html
