01/10/2020 (Agence Europe) – The harsh verdict delivered by the Karelian Supreme Court against the Russian historian Yuri Dmitriev in the absence of his legal counsel “cannot be deemed to have complied with fair trial guarantees and is a further illustration of a broader pattern of judicial harassment against human rights defenders, journalists and other independent or critical voices, which has been growing in the Russian Federation in recent years”, said Dunja Mijatović, the Council of Europe’s Commissioner for Human Rights. In the statement, which was issued on Wednesday 30 September, the day after Dmitriev was sentenced to 13 years in a high-security prison, having previously been acquitted of the same charges, she urges “the Russian authorities to reverse this alarming trend of targeting Russian civil society.” (VL)