On April 21, 2022 a cassation court in Moscow held a hearing on Azat Miftakhov’s appeal. The court reduced Azat’s sentence by three months, from six years in prison to five years and nine months.
Although any reduction of Azat’s sentence is a welcome news, this cassation court decision is grossly insufficient. Azat is an innocent victim of political persecution. We continue to call on the Russian authorities to immediately and unconditionally release him.
The Azat Miftakhov Committee
On April 21, 2022 a cassation court in Moscow is scheduled to hear an appeal in Azat Miftakhov’s case. Azat is currently serving his six-year prison sentence at a penal labor colony in Omutninsk.
We continue to call for Azat’s immediate release and express our support and solidarity with him.
The Azat Miftakhov Committee
The Azat Miftakhov Committee sent a message to the International Mathematical Union Executive Committee on February 26, 2022 proposing that the second Azat Miftakhov Days, which include a panel on human rights in Russia co-organized with the prominent Russian NGO Memorial Human Rights Center, be a satellite event of the virtual ICM 2022.
The war in Ukraine deals a new blow to human rights in the region and causes an immense lot of suffering. We express our solidarity with Ukrainians, and those on both sides which will suffer from the loss of freedom and the consequences of the war. In this context we recall the case of Azat Miftakhov, who remains imprisoned in a penal colony on trumped-up political charges. We ask the IMU to reconsider the choice of Saint-Petersburg for the 2022 ICM, and we welcome the February 22 AMS statement making that suggestion.
Published by Prof. Ilya Kapovich in the Washington Post on February 21, 2022.
The Feb. 18 editorial “In a moment of peril, clarity” correctly pointed to the link between Russia’s aggression toward Ukraine and the Putin regime’s increasingly oppressive nature at home. However, the examples given of such domestic political oppression are far from the most jarring.
On Feb. 10, a court in Kansk sentenced three middle school boys for putative “terrorism” offenses. The boys, who were 14 at the time, were arrested by the FSB in June 2020 while putting up leaflets on the wall of a local FSB office. The leaflets expressed support for a jailed Moscow State University mathematics graduate student and an opposition political activist Azat Miftakhov. Although minors and civilians, the boys were tried by a military court in a closed proceedings. One of the boys, Nikita Uvarov, received a five-year prison sentence, likely because he refused to cooperate with the authorities from the start. The other two boys, who initially admitted some guilt under coercion, received suspended prison sentences.
Political persecution of children is barbaric and despicable, and Russian President Vladimir Putin is using the distraction of the Ukraine conflict to perpetrate this shameful practice.
Ilya Kapovich, New York
The writer is a member of the Azat Miftakhov Committee of Mathematicians.
The program is available here
Registration is mandatory by filling out the form here.
We are pleased to announce that the second Azat Miftakhov Days will take place on Tuesday and Wednesday July 5-6, 2022, in solidarity with Azat Miftakhov, a mathematics graduate student from the Moscow State University who has been arbitrarily detained by Russian state authorities since February 2019. Azat has been mistreated and tortured by the authorities while in detention. His trial, which took place after much delay in the Fall of 2020, was based largely on the testimony of “secret” government witnesses. In a grossly unjust and excessive decision, in January 2021 a court in Moscow sentenced Azat to six years imprisonment in a penal colony for “hooliganism”. Azat is currently serving this sentence in a labor colony in Omutninsk.
On the first day, we will honor the new generation of Russian mathematicians committed to human rights. The speakers are Ilya Dumanski (MIT), Alexander Petrov (Harvard) and Slava Rychkov (IHES). Their mathematical lectures will be broadcast live on Zoom and youtube.
On the second day, we will co-organize with Memorial Human Rights Center a panel to assess the human rights situation in Russia through the cases of persecuted academics. The panel will be hybrid, online and in person at the Institut des Hautes Études Scientifiques (IHES) in Paris, open to academics, human rights organizations and journalists. Amnesty International (Moscow office), DOXA and OVD-INFO have already agreed to participate.
On 29 December 2021, the Moscow City Court has ordered the closure of the prominent Russian NGO Memorial Human Rights Center for allegedly violating “foreign agent” legislation. Founded in 1991, HRC Memorial is one of the most respected human rights organizations in Russia and in the world. The prosecutors claimed that HRC Memorial repeatedly violated the “foreign agents” law by refusing to label their content as produced by a “foreign agent”. They also claimed that HRC Memorial justified “terrorism and extremism” by keeping a list of people detained for political reasons on its website. The list featured individuals imprisoned following unfair, politically-motivated trials, including Azat Miftakhov. On 28 December 2021, the Supreme Court ordered the liquidation of its sister organization, International Memorial.
The first Azat Miftakhov Day organized last year, attracted over 1600 participants and raised awareness in the mathematical community of the injustice suffered by our young colleague. We are counting on your participation in this second edition to send a strong message of solidarity to Azat and to press for his immediate and unconditional release.
Registration is mandatory both for participation online or in person. The registration form is available here.
Further information will be available on caseazatmiftakhov.org
A court in Kansk has announced a verdict in the case of the three Kansk teens, Nikita Uvarov, Bogdan Andreyev and Denis Mihailenko.
The three middle school boys, all 14 years old at the time, were arrested in June 2020 in Kansk when putting up a leaflet in support of Azat Miftakhov on the wall of a local FSB office.
As a result of that arrest, the FSB charged them with various trumped up terrorism offenses.
Numerous media outlets reported that one of the key pieces of “evidence” against the boys was a virtual model of an FSB building that they built in the computer game Minecraft where they were blowing it up.
Although the boys are minors and civilians, they were tried by a military court in a closed proceedings.
The court found Nikita Uvarov guilty of “training for terrorism” and sentenced him to five years imprisonment in a penal colony. Similar to Azat Miftakhov, Uvarov denied any guilt from the start.
The other two boys, who admitted some guilt during the initial arrest under coercion, received suspended sentences of four and three years.
Nikita Uvarov, who had already spent a year in pretrial confinement before being released by an appeal court, was taken back into custody in the courtroom after the verdict was read.
The Kansk case harkens to the darkest period of 1930s in the Russian history when Stalin’s Great Terror sent millions to the Gulag.
We condemn this cruel, grotesque and unjust verdict and call for an immediate and unconditional release of Nikita Uvarov.
Political persecution of children is a barbaric and shameful practice that has no place in modern civilized society.
The Kansk case verdict comes on the heels of a recent report that Azat Miftakhov himself, who is currently serving his 6-year prison sentence at a colony in Omutninsk, has been denied access by the censors to a basic mathematical textbook. All signs indicate that political repression by Putin’s regime continues to intensify. The world should not look away.
Azat Miftakhov’s wife Elena Gorban reports that the censors at the correctional colony refused to let Azat receive a textbook “Ordinary Differential Equations.”
The textbook, authored by A. I. Bufetov, N. B. Goncharuk and Yu. S. Ilyashenko, was originally published in 2019. The censors did not provide any explanation for this denial.
A Vologda province court has ordered the release of a anarchist political activist Ruslan Gatamov. He was convicted in October 2021 on a “hooliganism” charge in relation to a protest on October 30–31, 2019 at an office of the United Russia Party and sentenced to 300 hours (12.5 days) of correctional labor. Although Gatamov pleaded not guilty to the charge, he admitted throwing a Molotov cocktail at the wall of the United Russia office. The court released Gatamov over the prosecution’s objections on humanitarian grounds, without canceling his conviction.
The case stands in marked contrast with that of another anarchist political activist, Azat Miftakhov, who received a six year prison sentence in January 2021, accused of breaking a window during another protest, also at a United Russia office, and also convicted of “hooliganism.” The charge against Miftakhov, based on fabricated evidence of “secret” government witnesses, was on its face less serious than that against Gatamov. Yet Miftakhov was tortured and mistreated while imprisoned and received a grossly excessive sentence that he is currently serving in a labor colony in Omutninsk. We call on the Russian authorities to exercise leniency and compassion in Azat Miftakhov’s case, which they have just demonstrated they are capable of doing, and to immediately release Azat from imprisonment.
The case of Azat Miftakhov