Hard day today. It's been exactly two years since I was illegally detained and imprisoned. Two years of surveillance and harassment. Two years of over 150 rights violations. Two years of no justice. We are still waiting for the pretrial to even finish.
It's hard to think back on that day. The cops violated my rights in a number of ways. They hid me from my lawyers. They never told me what I was accussed of. They never informed my embassy. The same morning, the interior minister said they had plenty of evidence of wrongdoing.
Of course, none of this evidence ever showed up, and she later said in testimony that they only ever arrested me to stop me from potentially doing something. The official justification for my arrest was a phone call, saying I was Russian. A call that never even mentioned a crime.
After being held illegally at the airport, without access to a lawyer, and not being told what I'd done, they finally arrested me in the evening. They didn't have a translator and failed to read me my rights. Then they took me to a police car, and kept me there for three hours
I was sitting in the back of this car on a dark parking lot, until 2:30am. No-one knew where I was. I honestly thought I would never come back.
So yeah, this is not a great day. There have been no signs whatsoever that anyone will be held legally accountable for all these abuses. International organizations repeatedly call for the government to respect human rights, but that's still not happening.
The pre-trial was suspended in the end of December. In that part of the hearing, the judge claimed all my rights had been respected, irrespective of the evidence against that assertion. The pretrial still has not been continued.
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