Today, March 11, marks the 35th anniversary of the political prisoner, citizen of Ukraine Marlen Mustafayev, who is in places of detention on the territory of the Russian Federation.
Crimean Tatar activist Marlen Mustafayev was groundlessly detained in the occupied Crimea by Russian law enforcement a few days before the full-scale invasion: on February 9, 2022, and already on November 30, 2022, he was sentenced by the Southern District Military Court to 17 years in prison, the first 3 of which he will spend in prison . According to the occupants, Marlen Mustafayev was allegedly a terrorist (part 1 of article 205.5 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation), but in fact his fault was only that he was a caring person and helped others. Thus, the occupants are trying to sow fear among the Crimean Tatar people and stop their long-term unarmed resistance to the Russian occupation of Crimea.
The court case was fabricated on the basis of the so-called evidence far-fetched by Russian law enforcement officers, who, in particular, refused to take samples of Marlen’s voice for phonoscopic examination, but instead provided the court with the results of an examination of audio recordings, in which allegedly his voice was identified.
At the end of 2022, Marlen was transferred from Rostov-on-Don to pre-trial detention center No. 3 in the city of Novocherkassk, Rostov Region, where he remains while his lawyer Yekaterina Boyko’s appeal against the sentence of the Southern District Military Court is being considered.
It should be noted that during a search in the house where Marlen Mustafayev lived, Russian law enforcement officers stole his wife’s Ukrainian documents and subsequently denied their existence at all. Lawyer of the Crimean Tatar Resource Center lawyer Volodymyr Liashenko helped recover the stolen documents and now Marlen Mustafayev’s wife and his minor daughters have all the proper documents of Ukrainian citizens and are safe.
The Crimean Tatar Resource Center congratulates Marlen Mustafayev on his birthday and conveys words of support to him and his family. We strongly condemn all illegal sentences of the occupation courts and the courts of the Russian Federation against citizens of Ukraine and hope for the speedy release of all illegally detained citizens in the temporarily occupied territories of Ukraine and in Russia.
At the same time, the Crimean Tatar Resource Center calls on the state authorities of Ukraine to intensify work on the release of Ukrainian citizens from places of captivity controlled by the occupying state, and the international community to increase pressure on Russia in order to stop political persecution in Crimea, in particular, to increase personal sanctions against persons responsible for the violation of human rights in the temporarily occupied territories.