More than a hundred lawyers spoke in support of their colleague Benyasha

More than one hundred and twenty Russian lawyers came out in support of Krasnodar lawyer Mikhail Benyash, who was recognized as a “foreign agent” and deprived of his legal status. They signed an open letter to the president of the Federal Chamber of Advocates, Svetlana Volodina, with a demand to end the prosecution of her colleague.

“We know Mikhail Benyash as a professional lawyer and a fighter for the independence of the Russian legal profession. He always fulfilled his professional duty correctly, every day he fought for his clients. Deprivation of the status of a lawyer for statements in which he expresses disagreement with the current position of the authorities or bodies of the self-government of the bar unacceptable,” says the text of the appeal to Volodyna.

Mikhail Benyash, a native of Sochi, is a former member of the Bar Association of the Krasnodar Territory and a well-known public figure in the region, who acted as a defender at trials against oppositionists and citizens who refused to fight in Ukraine.

The Russian authorities are pursuing Benyash for the first time. In 2018, he was beaten by the police. It happened on the day when the lawyer was going to act as a defender in the case of those detained at protests against raising the retirement age. Later, the Krasnodar court found Benyash himself guilty of violence against the police and fined him. While waiting for the verdict, the lawyer spent a month in the pre-trial detention center.

In October last year, the Ministry of Justice of Russia added Benyash to the list of “foreign agents”. In February of this year, the lawyer was first fined 30,000 rubles on charges of discrediting the Russian army (the reason was posts on the Internet with the phrase “No war”), and then he was suspended from the status of a lawyer for a period of three years allegedly for violating professional ethical standards. The reason for this decision was Benyash’s posts on social networks criticizing the Ministry of Justice and the immutability of power in Russia.

• Recently, repression against Russian lawyers expressing anti-war views or providing professional assistance to the opposition has intensified. Due to pressure from the authorities, such well-known lawyers as Vadym Klyuvgant, Konstantin Dobrynyn and Henry Reznyk left the Federal Chamber of Advocates. The lawyers defending the opposition, Leonid Krikun, Ivan Pavlov, Yevgeny Smirnov, and Ilya Novikov, were forced to leave Russia. The former president of the Bar Association of Udmurtia, Dmitry Talantov, is in pretrial detention on charges of spreading “fakes” about the Russian army, and he may face up to 15 years in prison.