The Board of Appeal supported pre-trial restraint for Kozachkov
On December 20, the examining court arrested Mikhail Kozachkov for two months. The journalist's lawyers appealed this judgement to the appellate board of the Almaty City Court. The appeal was dismissed.
Kozachkov's defense challenged the judge in the course of the hearings, but the challenge was dismissed as well.
The guarantors of Mikhail Kozachkov were Tamara Kaleyeva, the founder of the International Foundation for Protection of Freedom of Speech "Adil Soz", and Zhemis Turmagambetova, the Executive Director of the Public Foundation "Charter for Human Rights". However, neither examining court nor the appeliate board did not listen to them in person.
Earlier, lawyer Murat Adam told that Mikhail Kozachkov was under pressure.
“Journalist Mikhail Kozachkov is taken out of the pre-trial detention center secretly from his defenders and put under pressure. Lawyers are not notified about the investigative actions,” he wrote on Facebook.
According to him, on December 26, Kozachkov was taken out of the pre-trial detention center twice. In the morning he was taken allegedly to study the service documents, and in the evening he was taken for a "conversation".
“On the morning of December 26, 2022, the investigators of the operational investigative group of the Financial Monitoring Agency (FMA) summoned Kozachkov without informing the defenders of the investigative actions. They tried to make him study the service documents. Mikhail kept cool and refused to do so in absence of his lawyers.
We got to know that on the same evening of December 26, 2022, at 7 PM operational officers of the FMA or Almaty Economic Investigations Department (EID) illegally took Kozachkov from pre-trial detention center No. 72 to the EID under the pretext of investigative actions. None of Kozachkov's lawyers was notified about that.
Kozachkov was illegally detained in the EID building in Almaty for more than three hours. FMA operational investigators illegally held a “conversation” with him, persuaded him to “cooperate” i.e. to give the testimony they needed, exerted psychological pressure, tried to force Kozachkov confess to untruths. Mikhail was taken back to pre-trial detention center No. 72 at 11 PM ,” said Murat Adam.
Lawyers got to know all that only the next day.
Adil Soz demands an honest and open investigation into the case of Mikhail Kozachkov and reminds that, in accordance with Part 1 of Article 147 of the Code of Criminal Procedure, "Detention in custody as a preventive measure shall be applied only where it is impossible to apply other less stringent preventive measures."
