A court in southern Russian city has sentenced a blogger and journalist Sergey Reznik to one year and six months in prison on charges of insulting a local judge and an attempt to offer a bribe.
Sergey Reznik was found guilty of insulting a judge in Rostov-on-Don in a series of critical blog posts published on the LiveJournal social network, dedicated to the head of Rostov-on-Don's arbitration court, Olga Solovyeva. The judge found the manner of describing her personality and activities insulting and filed an application to the court.
Then the cases began to rain down as if out of the horn of plenty. Sergey Reznik was also convicted of offering a bribe to get his car through a technical inspection, and organizing fake threats against himself. In spring 2012 Reznik went to the police with a complaint about some unknown persons who had phoned him and demanded to stop publishing revealing materials on the net threatening him and members of his family. However, during the process, one of the witnesses for the prosecution said he had been asked by the defendant to phone him and utter some threats in order to have grounds for the application to the police.
According to the blogger, three new criminal cases can be brought against him in the near future, as three other Rostov-on-Don officials have felt insulted by materials Reznik published in his blog.
Author: Julia Alieva