A disbarred lawyer was found guilty of beating policemen

The court in Krasnodar again found a lawyer deprived of legal status, Mikhail Benyash, guilty of assaulting policemen in 2018 – he was sentenced to a fine of 30 thousand rubles. This is reported by Kavkaz.Realii. Earlier, the court canceled a similar decision, which was made back in 2019.

Benyash announced the new decision in his Telegram channel. According to the SOTA channel, the prosecutor’s office demanded that the lawyer be fined 40,000 rubles. Benyash himself does not admit guilt, claiming that he was beaten by the police.

Benyash is known, among other things, for protecting participants in protest actions, oppositionists, human rights defenders, and since the beginning of the war, contract workers who refused to be sent to Ukraine. In September 2018, he was detained by plainclothes operatives on the day of an uncoordinated action against raising the retirement age. According to him, they forcibly dragged him into a car and took him to the police department. When Benyash was brought to court the next day, there were bruises on his face – the lawyer said that the security forces threw him face down on the asphalt and hit him several times already in the office.

According to the police, during the detention, Benyash hit his head against the car, bit one of the operatives on the hand, and elbowed the other. On the basis of their testimony, a criminal case of violence against a representative of the authorities was initiated against the lawyer.

In October 2019, the judge of the Leninsky District Court of Krasnodar, Diana Bilyak, found lawyer Benyash guilty and sentenced him to a fine of 60,000, which was later reduced by half. Sanctions of the article provide for a fine of up to 200 thousand rubles or up to five years of imprisonment.

• At the request of the Ministry of Justice, Benyash was recently denied the status of a lawyer for three years. More than 150 of his colleagues from all over the country demanded the cessation of repression against the lawyer – some of them openly declared the politically motivated case of the Krasnodar lawyer.
• Last December, in an interview with Kavkaz.Realia, Benyash said that, according to his information, the actions of the Ministry of Justice were initiated at the federal level and supported by numerous reports – anonymous or clearly staged. Four months ago, the Ministry of Justice recognized Mikhail Benyash as a “foreign agent”. He was also fined for the so-called discrediting of the army.