The prosecutor needed to send the co-chairman of “Memorial” to psychiatrists because of “a heightened sense of justice”

Prosecutor Svetlana Kyldysheva, at a hearing in the Golovinsky District Court of Moscow in the case of the co-chairman of “Memorial” Oleg Orlov, required him to be sent for a forensic psychiatric examination. According to the state prosecutor, she observes in the human rights defender “a heightened sense of justice and a lack of instinct for self-preservation.”

One of the oldest Russian human rights defenders is accused of repeatedly discrediting the Russian army. The reason was his article for the French publication Mediapart, reposted on Facebook. According to the investigation, in the text the actions of the Russian military are characterized as “criminal, fascist, related to the killing of civilians and the destruction of civil infrastructure.”

At the meeting on October 11, the prosecutor stated that in 1980, Orlov went out on a picket with a poster against the war in Afghanistan, and in 1984 – in support of Polish Solidarity, and indicated that “at that time, such people were sent for examination”. says the “Memorial” publication. The human rights organization notes that Orlov did not go to these pickets.

The prosecutor also pointed out that the 70-year-old human rights defender could have “changes in the vessels of the brain” due to age, she considered age to be a mitigating factor in the case. Nobel laureate Dmitry Muratov, Orlov’s public defender, noted that the public prosecutor is not a specialist in ultrasound or computer tomography and cannot know about the state of the defendant’s blood vessels.

• The accusation demanded that Orlov be sentenced to a fine of 250,000 rubles. The article on the discrediting of the Russian army was added to the Russian Criminal Code after the invasion of Ukraine and is usually used to prosecute anti-war activists.
• In Soviet times, a “heightened sense of justice” was often indicated as one of the symptoms when making psychiatric diagnoses for dissidents and oppositionists. In 1977, the World Psychiatric Association adopted a declaration condemning the use of psychiatry in the USSR for political repression.