Avdotina Alexandra

Judge of the Presnensky District Court of Moscow

AVDOTINA, Alexandra Anatolyevna was appointed judge of the Presnensky District Criminal Court of the city of Moscow by decree of the President of the Russian Federation of October 23, 2017.

Carrying out political repression using her official position.

From the very start of his work in the Presnensky court, the young judge Alexandra Avdotina began to work on high-profile criminal cases. In December 2017, she arrested a member of the Moscow Public Monitoring Commission (PMC), Denis Nabiullin, accused of attempted fraud. According to investigators, the human rights activist was accused of receiving $500,000 — about 29 million rubles — for a promise to help the arrested person by organizing a medical examination for him, followed by a change in incarceration conditions. According to the human rights activist himself, “This whole situation is an operation of the FSB, they discredit the PMC as a whole.”

In July 2018, Judge Avdotina sentenced the former deputy director of Spetstroy, Colonel Alexander Buryakov, to five years in a general regime colony in a case of embezzlement of 1 billion rubles. The process took place in a special mode, without examining the evidence and with a priori guilty plea by Buryakov.

In April 2019, Judge Alexandra Avdotina refused a petition by the former governor of the Kirov region Nikita Belykh, sentenced to 8 years in prison, to defer payment of a 48-million fine. The inability to repay the fine, whose size, together with the surcharge, had exceeded 51 million rubles by that time, makes it impossible for Belykh to be released on parole.

Alexandra Avdotina took part in the Moscow case, the criminal prosecution of opposition activists who protested against authorities’ refusals to register independent candidates in the elections to the Moscow City Duma. The peaceful protest on June 27, 2019, culminated in a brutal dispersal by the police and the Russian Guard and approximately one and a half thousand detainees. On August 2, Judge Avdotina arrested a student and blogger Yegor Zhukov, an activist Kirill Zhukov, and a volunteer Alexey Minyailo until September 27 for “organizing and participating in riots.” As a result, Yegor Zhukov received three years probation for his videos on Youtube, Kirill Zhukov got three years of a jail sentence for trying to raise the helmet of one of the officers, and the case against Minyailo was dismissed.