 Source: HRO.org (info) Agora Human Rights Association, citing Svetlana Sidovkina the lawyer representing Margarita Charikova on behalf of the human rights group, reports that on 5th April 2013 twenty-five-year-old Margarita Charikova was released from the Pechatniki pre-trial detention centre in Moscow. Margarita Charikova suffers from the congenital absence of a vital part of her digestive system. ‘This morning all the necessary documents concerning the release from detention on bail subject to travel conditions were handed by a Federal Drug Control Agency investigator to the special section of the pre-trial detention centre in our presence,’ said lawyer, Svetlana Sidorkina. “Margarita will go to her mother’s home in the Moscow region and the question of her hospitalization will be resolved. On 4th April 2013 Moscow’s Savelovsky district court was to consider a petition from investigators to extend Charikova’s time in custody. However, on 3rd April 2013 the Federal Drug Control Agency unexpectedly withdrew their earlier petition and the term of Charikova’s time in custody expired on 12th April 2012. The lawyer, Sidorkina, links the release of Margarita Charikova to the considerable public reaction and the position taken by the European Court of Human Rights, which has requested information from the Russian government about Charikova’s health and treatment in the pre-trial detention centre. In March 2013 an urgent application was sent to the European Court of Human Rights for the immediate release of the twenty-four-year-old Margarita Charikova on the grounds of the threat to her health and life. The disabled young woman who has a congenital absence of a vital part of her digestive system (the rectum) was being held in a pre-trial detention centre and, according to her mother, was ‘rotting alive.’ The lawyer, Sidorkina, asked the European Court to quickly release Charikova and oblige Russia to conduct an examination to determine whether she has a serious illness which would prevent her from being held in custody. Charikova’s mother, Erika Kaminskaya, told Agora that her daughter was arrested in Moscow on 11th December 2012 by Federal Drug Control officials who removed a pharmaceutical product Piratsetam that had been mixed with a psychotropic stimulant of a homemade amphetamine. She said that after many operations Margarita used this medicine on her own as an anaesthetic as she had suffered terrible pain from birth. On 12th December 2012 Margarita Charikova was charged with the ‘making for sale of narcotic drugs or psychotropic substances, or similar items’ (Article 30, Section 1, and Article 228, Section3, Paragraph G of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation). On 15th December 2012, on the initiative of the investigation, the court ruled that Charikova be committed into custody, and the same day she was detained at the Pechatniki pre-trial detention centre. |
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