The Latvian Russian Union statement.
The Appeal Court has upheld the ruling of the first instance court sentencing Yury Alekseev, the creator and a long-term moderator of the ”IMHO club – free opinion territory” web platform, to one year and one month of imprisonment.
The Latvian Russian Union board expresses support to Yury Alekseev and considers the court verdict as apparently unfair. Yury Alekseev has been punished for comments formenting ethnic hatred which he did not write. He has never admitted to it. We have known Yury Alekseev as a journalist and a public person for many years and we have all grounds to state that those illiterate and primitive comments that are attributed to him could not have been written by him. To support such a statement, various experts’ opinions were presented to the attention of the court but the court refused to take them into consideration.
The very fact that the IMHO club platrform was banned at the same time as the charges were filed against Yury Alekseev proves that plurality of opinions, views and convictions is no longer encouraged in Latvia but on the contrary is perceived as a criminal offence. De-facto Alekseev has been punished for his free-thinking and encouragement of free discussion.
We do hope that the Latvian Court of Cassation will review the guilty verdict fairly and without bias. We are convinced that the European Court of Human Rights will in any case restore justice in the case of Yury Alekseev.
