Alexander Pichugin

“From July to November 2020, the Clooney Foundation for Justice’s TrialWatch initiative monitored the criminal trial of Alexander Pichugin in Nizhny Novgorod, Russia. Mr. Pichugin is a journalist and was also the anonymous administrator of a channel called “Sorokin Hvost” on online messaging platform Telegram . Mr. Pichugin was charged with violating Article 207.1 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation, which makes it a crime to “publicly disseminate disguised as truthful knowingly false information about circumstances that pose a threat to the life and safety of citizens.””

记录记者身份、Telegram 频道管理与指控；法条引述为历史背景。

“The charges related to a sarcastic comment Mr. Pichugin made on “Sorkin Hvost” on April 12, 2020, which is celebrated by the Russian Orthodox Church as Palm Sunday, criticizing the holding of Easter services during the COVID-19 pandemic. In particular, Mr. Pichugin said that there was “ a planned campaign to infect the population with a deadly disease ” and likened participants in church services to “ adherers-suicide assassins” who would be used “as disseminators of infection ” and suggested the Church had gathered “them in specially designated places, where the distributors deliberately violate sanitary rules and then penetrate the society.””

报告明确涉案发言是对疫情期间宗教活动的讽刺评论；不把指控当真实危险。

“By contrast, the defense argued that the post was an opinion, not a statement of fact. A linguistic expert for the defense testified that the post was written in the form of a metaphor.36 Mr. Pichugin self -described the genre of the text as “sarcastic journalism” 37 and explained that to give people the opportunity to “look at the situation from the other side” he used “the method of detachment, alienation.” 38”

辩方主张意见而非事实，并由语言学专家说明比喻性质；属于庭审论点和证词。

“Further, the defense pointed out that the prosecution’s expert’s opinion was flawed. In particular, during cross-examination, the expert admitted that the post had been presented to them for analysis as having come from a news channel, not as an anonymous post on a Telegram channel.40 On this basis, the defense petitioned the court for a supplementary linguistic examination. This petition was granted, and a court appointed linguistic expert report was prepared by the Federally-funded Institution “Privolzhsky Regional Forensic Center.” These additional experts concluded that Mr. Pichugin’s message included both facts (information that could be verified) and opinions (information that could not be verified). The experts also concluded that the message was constructed in the form of a metaphor and that the overall communicative goal was to share a personal opinion about the negative attitude the author had to the actions described in the message.41”

交叉询问后辩方请求补充语言学鉴定并获准；补充专家同时认定有事实与意见内容，不应简化为完全支持一方。

“On November 11, 2020, the Bogorodsk City Court found Mr. Pichugin guilty and sentenced him to a fine of 300,000 rubles.”

报告记录定罪与罚金；之后的作者批评不改变这是已发生判决的记载。

“The constitutional approach to the facts of the case would have been, on the one hand, to question the constitutionality of the law, which criminalises the alleged act of the accused, and on the other hand to identify the intention of the author independently.”

专家提出本应质疑法律合宪性并独立认定发言意图的评价；不是已经获得的救济。