Russia’s Supreme Court has repealed a guilty verdict passed on opposition activist Ildar Dadin for violating the rules of public gatherings, a TASS correspondent reports from the courtroom.
"The Presidium of the Supreme Court of the Russian Federation has ruled to repeal the verdict passed against Dadin by Moscow’s Basmanny Court, terminate the proceedings under the criminal case, release Dadin from custody and recognize his right to rehabilitation," the judge read out the judgment.
Dadin will most likely be released from the penal colony on Feb. 27, Dadin’s lawyer Kseniya Kostromina told.
Article 212.1, introduced in the Russian Criminal Code in July 2014, stipulates criminal liability for repeated violations of the rules of public gatherings. Dadin is the first and by far the only one person convicted under this article.
In December 2015, Moscow’s Basmanny District Court found Dadin guilty on four counts of participating in unauthorized protests in Moscow. He was sentenced to three years in a penal colony but then the Moscow City Court reduced his jail term to two and a half years.
Dadin filed an appeal against the article under which he had been convicted with the Constitutional Court.
Complaints against torture In November 2016, the Russian media published a letter by Dadin saying that he was subject to torture while serving his sentence in the Segezh colony in Karelia, northwestern Russia. However, independent doctors who visited him in the colony found no signs of bodily injuries, neither did investigators. Later it became known that after a probe, Dadin was transferred to a penal colony in the Altai region, Siberia.