November 2024

What We Achieved Thanks to Your Support

Key Highlights

Our Defendant, Evgeny Bestuzhev, is Free!

In November 2024, the entire OVD-Info team experienced a moment of relief: political analyst Evgeny Bestuzhev received a suspended sentence. We accompanied him through this case for many months and were deeply concerned. The prosecution had requested 8 years’ imprisonment, so his attorney called the verdict a victory. We were incredibly happy to see Evgeny free!

Expanding Legal Assistance

Thanks to your support and donations, OVD-Info funds legal aid for hundreds of criminal cases and thousands of administrative cases related to freedom of assembly and speech. Since November 2024, we have also been providing legal assistance to individuals prosecuted for participating in “undesirable” organisations, displaying the symbols of peaceful movements labelled as “extremist”, and those suspected by the authorities of involvement in such organisations.

Campaign Against Prison Censorship

In October, OVD-Info launched a campaign against the censorship of letters in prisons and detention centres, which continued throughout November.

Since August, we have processed over 7,500 letters via our “Lifeline” service. About 20% of these letters were then sent via FSIN-Pismo (a state penitentiary mail service), and we found that one-tenth of those were blocked by censors. The strictest censorship was observed in:

• Women’s Detention Centre-6 “Pechatniki” in Moscow;
• Detention Centre-1 in Ufa (housing some defendants in the Baymak case);
• Detention Centre-3 in Belgorod.

Censors in these facilities approved only one out of 411 prisoners’ replies we tracked—and even that one was partially censored.

To counteract this, we launched a mass appeal campaign using our “Dyatel” (“Woodpecker”) generator, allowing people to send complaints to these detention centres demanding an end to illegal censorship. In just a few days, over 2,000 complaints were sent.

New Year Letter Campaign for Political Prisoners

Many political prisoners will spend another holiday season behind bars. To ensure they receive messages of support, we launched a New Year letter campaign via “Lifeline”. Our illustrators created a special set of monochrome postcards (as many prisons only print in black and white), and we launched the campaign six weeks before the holidays to ensure delivery.

“Emergency Assistance”: Sergey Nevorotin’s Release

In November, we secured the release of seriously ill political prisoner Sergey Nevorotin. Sergey, diagnosed with stage IV cancer, was freed thanks to legal efforts led by OVD-Info attorney Gevorg Aleksanyan. For seriously ill individuals, access to urgent medical care is critical — something often denied in prison.

Currently, over 160 politically persecuted individuals suffer from severe health conditions. Some have pre-existing disabilities, while others developed serious illnesses due to imprisonment. Authorities sometimes use health as leverage, denying treatment or placing inmates in punitive confinement.

This is why we launched “Emergency Assistance” — a project providing legal aid to prisoners in need of medical care, helping with complaints, appeals, and requests for transfers to medical facilities.

Express Help

November 2024 Legal Bot and Hotline Activity