The civic journalist Iryna Danylovych fainted while being convoyed in Crimea. She has an intention to go on a hunger strike because of abuse

The civic journalist Iryna Danylovych fainted while being convoyed in Crimea. She has an intention to go on a hunger strike because of abuse
Iryna Danylovych

The civic journalist Iryna Danylovych fainted while being convoyed to the illegal ‘Feodosia city court’ to finish the familiarization with the materials of the criminal case.

The father of the imprisoned journalist Bronislav Danylovych provided this information to the ZMINA media.

He said that his daughter’s health conditions were going from bad to worse and added that Iryna had asked about moving the date of the familiarization because she was often losing coordination and had been close to fainting. Despite that, the documents had been drawn up at the detention center that she had no medical contraindications for convoying.

This is related to the ‘court’s’ interest in quickly finishing the process of the familiarization with the materials of the case and passing them to the ‘court’ of appeal.

It’s known that the journalist had lost her consciousness at least once while being convoyed.

A week before, Iryna Danylovych passed the medical examination which she had been needing since the end of the previous year due to her acute otitis.

As reported by her father, the examination was a mere demonstrative formality, and it never contributed to the diagnosis formulation. The otolaryngologist allowed by the administration of the detention center to examine Iryna, said that the journalist needed not her but a psychiatrist, and made no medical report on the nature of the disease and treatment methods.

Bronislav Danylovych

Considering the life-threatening nature of the inflammation, the journalist’s advocates are planning to report the doctor’s crime under Article 124 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation (failing to provide sick care without a valid reason).

In addition, the relatives of Iryna Danylovych demand to allow a responsible and professionally competent doctor to complete the medical examination in front of the journalist’s lawyer because it’s only the presence of a defender that may guarantee the fully provided assistance.

The defense will as well report the crime of the emergency doctor who denied Iryna with the proper care as she got sick during the court debates. He formalized it as Iryna’s voluntary refusal of hospitalization, yet there are no relevant documents, signed by her, attached to the materials of the criminal case.

If this fact receives a proper legal assessment, it will make another proof that Iryna Danylovych was deprived of the opportunity to defend herself in the trial court because of her bad state of health.

The journalist herself informed that she was intending to go on dry hunger strike in protest against the abuse.
We will remind, Iryna Danylovych is a nurse and civic activist from Feodosia. She cooperated with the INzhyr media project and the Crimean Process initiative. Iryna had been defending the interests of health workers on the peninsula: that is, she joined an independent trade union, she wrote a lot about her colleagues’ rights violation such as underpayments for work with covid patients etc.

The FSB officers abducted Iryna Danylovych on April 29. Until May 7, she had been kept in the basement of the FSB without any legal status or assistance. Iryna was interrogated on a polygraph, suffered psychological pressure (such as the threats of taking her to the woods or to Mariupol) and received only one meal a day. She also told this to the illegal ‘court’ in Feodosia.

Later, the explosive was ‘found’ in the bag confiscated from Danylovych. On May 7, the so-called ‘Kyiv district court’ in Simferopol chose a measure of restraint for her in the form of two months of detention.

By the end of July, the journalist was able to communicate that the FSB officers were still pressuring her at the Simferopol detention center. Thus, they had caused her bodily harm while convoying her to the court.

On July 5, the ‘judge’ Olga Kuznetsova extended the detention of Iryna Danylovych for four months, having ignored the fact that the journalist was detained a week before the documents had been officially drawn up.

At the court hearing on November 7, the defense filed a motion on calling 16 people, including the FSB officers responsible for the journalist’s abduction, her illegal detention in the basement of the FSB and the falsification of the criminal case, to the court for being questioned in the status of witnesses. The illegal formation denied all requests apart from calling one defense witness, Suleyman Kadyrov, who did not have any information on the merits of the accusation and could give no more than characterizing evidence.

On December 28, 2022, the so-called ‘Feodosia city court’ sentenced Iryna Danylovych for seven years in prison and fined her 50 thousand rubles on false charges for ‘possession of explosives’, despite the outrage of the international human rights community.

For the explanations of the human rights advocates on the ways how the FSB and the ‘court’ had falsified the criminal case of the civic journalist, look here.

march 21, 2023
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