Manerkina Yulia

Judge of the Moscow City Court.

Carrying out political repression using her official position.

Judge Manerkina took part in many politically motivated persecutions and cases during her judicial career. On November 27, 2014, she upheld the decision to detain one of the leaders of Russian nationalists Alexander Belov (Potkin) in the case of the legalization of funds and property of the Kazakh BTA Bank (part 4 of article 174 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation). The bank was previously run by Kazakh opposition oligarch Mukhtar Ablyazov before it came under state control. Another case was also opened against Belov under an anti-extremist article in Kazakhstan (analogous to Article 282 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation). On January 21, 2015, she again left Alexander Belov (Potkin) in custody in the same case. According to observers, the persecution of Belov was related to his refusal to take part in the anti-Ukrainian campaign and recruiting Russian nationalists to fight in Donbas.

On December 14, 2015, she left Sergei Akhmetov in custody. The activist was accused of attacking a police officer, under Art. 318 part 1 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation (violence against a government official) during a rally on Manezhnaya Square, although he was not in Moscow at all that day. Moreover, according to the examination of the Ministry of Internal Affairs, Akhmetov did not look like a person from photographs from a criminal case. Akhmetov’s case was later dismissed.

On September 30, 2019, the Moscow City Court trio, consisting of the presiding judge Elena Ivanova and judges Yulia Manerkina and Anna Laukhina, decided to change the sentence of Pavel Ustinov for a one year suspended sentence. Ustinov was accused of using violence against a policeman, although the videos showed that he calmly stood on the street and looked at the phone. Nevertheless, the judges who examined the appeal against Ustinov’s sentence, including Manerkina, considered Ustinov’s guilt proven.