Dudar Natalia

Judge of the Basmanny District Court of Moscow (2004 - to date)

DUDAR, Natalia Nikolayevna (b. 1974) is a Moscow judge known for numerous politically motivated verdicts. Like most of her colleagues, Natalia Dudar began her career in court with secretarial work. In October 1999, she was appointed a criminal judge of the Basmanny District Court of Moscow. In 2004 she defended her Ph.D. thesis at the Moscow State Law Academy. In 2019, experts from the Dissernet community found a large amount of plagiarism in her work.

Political repression using his official position.

Natalia Dudar illegally sanctioned and extended the arrests of Platon Lebedev and Alexei Pichugin on trumped-up charges, absentee arrests of Yukos head of legal department Dmitry Gololobov and co-owner of Menatep Group Mikhail Brudno, extended the detention of seriously ill Vasily Aleksanyan, rejected complaints of Leonid Nevzlin.

In 2013, he recognizes the legitimacy of the criminal case against Alexei and Oleg Navalny and authorized wiretapping of five employees of Navalny’s Anti-Corruption Foundation. She fined the human rights information-analytical center Sova for 300 thousand rubles for refusing to voluntarily register as a “foreign agents”. In 2015, she sentenced activist Ildar Dadin to 3 years in a colony for participating in protests.

She actively participated in the political persecution of rally participants on Bolotnaya Square on May 6, 2012 (Bolotnaya Case) and repeatedly made unfair, unreasonable and illegal decisions concerning the defendants in the case. On May 29, 2012, issued a decision on house arrest of the first person involved in the Bolotnaya Case, Alexandra Dukhanina. July 5, 2012, Natalia Dudar extended the arrest of Mikhail Kosenko. On August 8, 2012, she extended the arrest of Vladimir Akimenkov until November 6. On February 28, 2013, she extended the arrest of Sergey Krivov and Artem Savelov. On March 1, 2013, she extended the arrest of Andrei Barabanov until May 28, Stepan Zimin until June 8, Yaroslav Belousov until June 9, Vladimir Akimenkov until June 10. On March 11, 2013, she refused to satisfy the complaints of Ilya Gushchin against investigators, on March 26, 2013, she rejected the complaint of Sergey Krivov against the actions of investigator Kurdyukov. On October 2, 2013, she extended the house arrest of Sergei Udaltsov until February 6, 2014.

Natalia Dudar continued political persecution of opposition activists in the Moscow Case too. Note that it is a case against participants of peaceful rallies in Summer 2019 against non-registration of independent candidates to the Moscow City Duma election. On September 25, 2019, Dudar extended the house arrest of a student of the Higher School of Economics Yegor Zhukov, the defendant in the Moscow case, and the detention of another defendant, Samariddin Rajabov, for two months. Judge Natalya Dudar agreed with the arguments of the investigation that they could “continue to engage in criminal activities or destroy evidence”.