Moscow - The defense team of the Ukrainian pilot Nadia Savchenko charged by Russia with complicity in the killing of Russian journalists will appeal a court ruling that found her inpatient psychiatric examination legal.
“The organization of Nadia Savchenko’s illegal inpatient psychiatric examination, today’s court ruling, and the entire course of the investigation give us grounds for addressing the appeal instance, where we will certainly file an appeal. We will also go to the European Court [of Human Rights] concerning illegal actions in relation to Nadia Savchenko,” lawyer Nikolai Polozov told journalists.
No official results of Savchenko’s psychological and psychiatric examination have been made public so far, he said.
Another lawyer, Mark Feygin, claimed that the Nov. 11 court ruling was handed down “in breach of the law, and the examination itself involved violations that migrated into Judge Karpov’s ruling.”
“The sense in placing Nadia Savchenko in a hospital was in isolating her from participation in the final phase of the election campaign in Ukraine. The only investigative procedure that was conducted with her at the Serbsky Institute is her examination before her discharge,” Feygin said.
The court ruling “acknowledges the existence of the Luhansk People’s Republic and uses an extralegal definition of ‘punitive’ in relation to the Aidar battalion,” he said.
Moscow’s Basmanny Court ruled earlier on Tuesday that Savchenko’s psychological and psychiatric examination had been ordered legitimately.
The Basmanny Court had ruled on Oct. 27 to extend Savchenko’s pretrial custody term by February 13, 2015, the date by which the investigation should be completed.
It was reported earlier that Savchenko, a 31-year-old navigator, was fighting with the Aidar volunteer battalion in eastern Ukraine when she was captured by illegal armed units near the town of Schastia, a suburb of Luhansk, in June. It turned out on July 8 that Savchenko was kept at a detention facility in Voronezh, Russia. On Sept. 24, she was brought to detention center No. 6 in Moscow. Investigators insisted that Savchenko had to undergo a psychiatric evaluation.
Savchenko pleads not guilty and says she was abducted on the Ukrainian territory.
