For more than a year, a crusading editor of an opposition newspaper in a Moscow suburb has been trying to fend off charges that he fomented extremism by publishing articles that created “negative stereotypes and negative images of members of the security forces,” among other faults.
However, in an unusual victory for the opposition, a court on Tuesday threw out the case against the editor, Pyotr Lipatov.
The court ruled that the expert testimony that prosecutors had relied upon to prove that the articles were extremist was unpersuasive.
The newspaper, Consensus and Truth, based in the city of Klin, has regularly focused attention on the shortcomings of local government and the authorities have long sought to shut it down.
Had they won the case, prosecutors would have had grounds to do so and might even have sought criminal penalties, including jail time, for Lipatov.
They had said that articles in the newspaper about local corruption, drug trafficking and illegal immigrants were extremist in nature.
The authorities have often used the extremism law to suppress the opposition across Russia.
In May, Lipatov was the subject of articles in the New York Times and a video on the Times’ Web site.
He said that after this news coverage, judicial officials seemed to scrutinize the prosecutors’ evidence more closely.
“They feared being shown that they were not handling the case fairly and properly,” he said in an interview on Tuesday.
In late May, a lower court judge in Klin ruled in Lipatov’s favor, and he said an appeals court upheld that decision on Tuesday, all but ending the prosecutors’ case.
Prosecutors in Klin did not respond to requests for comment on Tuesday.
Lipatov said the publicity had also had an impact in a separate case that involved him.
At an opposition rally in March last year, he was beaten by plainclothes police officers, but investigators refused to open an inquiry, even though the attack was videotaped and posted on the Internet.
Instead, the investigators tried to make Lipatov confess to having provoked the beating, but he refused. When the Times first contacted the investigators about why they had not questioned the plainclothes police officers, they stepped up the pressure on Lipatov.
Now, he said the investigators were leaving him alone.
He added, though, that they still would not open an investigation into the police officers who beat him in front of scores of witnesses.
Lipatov stepped down as editor of Consensus and Truth after the beating and after the extremism case was brought because, he said, he was concerned about his safety. However, he said he has retained close ties to the newspaper.
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