To joy. Grigory Melkonyants of Golos election monitoring movement delivers his final statement as prosecutors seek a 6‑year prison sentence

Your Honour, respected participants in the trial, dear friends!

Today is a joyous day for me. Our trial has drawn to a close before the verdict. It has been a fascinating experience. I have listened to the wonderful, sometimes emotional words of those who testified as witnesses, read letters filled with warmth, and received amazing postcards. At times, it felt like a real celebration, as if I were the one celebrating an anniversary, not the defendant.

Twenty-one months ago, on August 17, 2023, a new, captivating chapter of my life began. Since then, I’ve experienced a search, detention, a temporary detention facility, three pre-trial detention centres, 12 cells, more than 100 cellmates, and 26 court hearings. I cherish this experience dearly, for a great price has been paid for it. But most importantly, it has given me the opportunity to reflect on my journey and learn much about a world to which I previously paid insufficient attention.

I have seen how prison destroys people’s lives, depriving them of joy, and therefore of happiness. Because the joy of life is true happiness.

Do not be surprised by this word: joy. It might seem there’s little to rejoice about in my situation, in the gloom of imprisonment, when you haven’t seen family, friends, or colleagues for months. But there’s joy in in going through this ordeal and becoming stronger and not losing faith in the cause to which I have dedicated my entire life.

Here, in confinement, I have met many people whom I probably would never have encountered in ordinary life: people with different life experiences, different levels of education, and convicted under various articles. And every day, we have to agree on how to live together, such as how to organise cleaning duties in the cell, whether to air it or not, or where to get a refrigerator or a kettle. In essence, we are constantly holding small referendums and reaching consensus.

What greatly helps me in prison is that I am an optimist; in any situation, I always look for something good and try to support people. In this, I identify with the attitude of the heroine of a novel, the orphan girl Pollyanna. Her father, a clergyman, taught Pollyanna the “glad game”, which involves finding something to be joyful about in everything and looking for reasons for optimism. Thereafter, she taught this game to everyone around her. This does not mean denying problems, but rather seeking ways to solve them and deriving useful experience from them.

Try playing the “glad game” yourselves, because, if you think about it, each of us only has the present moment that we are living, and there is no other time when life is not “this moment”. And it doesn’t matter where you are at this instant: in your homeland or abroad, on holiday or at work, in an apartment or a traffic jam, at a polling station or in a prison cell. You need to live this very moment in joy and with positivity. Only the now exists, which is why it is called “the present”.

Therefore, this prison period has been very fruitful for me, both as a person and as a lawyer. I have enriched myself creatively: I started drawing, making collages and crafts, and writing poetry. I have gained a new perspective on people, relationships, and processes.

I began to enjoy the very flow of life, work, creativity, and intellectual freedom more. For one can imprison a person, but thought cannot be locked up, stopped, or taken away. My entire journey and what has been and remains my world cannot be taken away or cancelled. Perhaps to some, it seems dull, but without just laws and clear, useful procedures, the society we all dream of is impossible. I think about this constantly, and I am sure I am not alone in this. We are united by an unshakeable urge to think, to consider what will make the world better, and the will to make our own small contribution.

But let’s look at joy from another angle. Can one experience true joy from deception, from rigging, from persecuting an innocent person? What joy can there be in handling my case? A case that should have collapsed at the pre-investigation stage. A case they didn’t want to open, shuffling it from one authority to another. A case built not on evidence but on assumptions and the investigative officers’ ignorance of the fundamentals of civil, administrative, and criminal law. A case that has seen eight different investigators. This injustice of persecuting an innocent person is precisely what drains the joy from those mired in this affair.

But I bear no ill will towards anyone. The ability to forgive and let go of bad things, even in situations where you think it’s beyond your strength, makes forgiveness a happy moment in life.

Esteemed Court!

The investigators have constructed a unique situation. For the first time in our country’s history, they want to make the meeting room of Russia’s Central Election Commission the scene of a crime, and an expert who spoke there the criminal.

As a lawyer, I do not understand why I am here or why I am a defendant in this case. And most importantly, I do not understand why I am the one who has to prove my innocence, rather than the prosecution proving my guilt, as required by Article 49 of the Russian Constitution. In this case, the very event of a crime is absent. Yet I am forced to prove a negative: that the Golos movement is not a structural subdivision of ENEMO, whose activities are recognised as “undesirable” in Russia; and to prove that I was not involved in organising ENEMO’s activities by speaking at a roundtable at the Central Election Commission.

Ultimately, state bodies and stubborn facts helped prove my innocence. The first negative response from the Ministry of Justice states that ENEMO has no structural subdivisions in our country. The second response from the Ministry of Justice states that the activities of the Golos movement have not been recognised as undesirable. Nor have any judicial or other decisions been made to ban or restrict the activities of the Golos movement. And finally, the fact that ENEMO and the Golos movement are two different organisations is confirmed by the decisions of authorised state bodies, which included them in two different registers: ENEMO in the list of organisations whose activities are recognised as undesirable, and the ‘Golos’ movement in the register of so-called “foreign agents”.

It turns out that the entire accusation is based on unsubstantiated and unreliable information from officers, which has no evidentiary force, and on the subsequent fabrication of conclusions that distort the content of the documents attached to the case.

And here, the constitutional guarantee should come into play, according to which irreconcilable doubts about a person’s guilt are interpreted in favour of the accused. This should inevitably lead to an acquittal. Even if today such verdicts make up only 0.26% nationwide, it means they are possible, and the court does not always operate on the principle that guilt is invariably beyond doubt when issuing a verdict.

Friends!

I am a citizen of Russia, I love my country, and I deeply cherish my constitutional rights and freedoms. I am sincerely grateful to our ancestors for these achievements. Today, rights and freedoms may seem commonplace, but how differently they are perceived in prison, and how acutely one understands here that it is not enough to win them through blood and sweat; they must be constantly defended and upheld.

Therefore, I found great joy in working on proposals for how to realise electoral rights in pre-trial detention conditions. For example: how a prisoner in isolation can sign in support of a candidate’s nomination, how to make a donation to an electoral fund, how to receive campaign materials from election participants, how to properly verify a prisoner’s identity when receiving a ballot, how to ensure extraterritorial voting, or how to effectively implement observation. All this is very important, as a person in a pre-trial detention centre retains their full range of electoral rights until they are sentenced to a correctional facility by a court. This is often forgotten. During these months of engaged observation and reflection, I have managed to find many good solutions.

I cannot know how much longer my confinement will last, but I am confident that sooner or later I will be released and reunited with my loved ones and friends. And this anticipation fills my soul with joy. I am happy that, even in prison, I can call my mother, correspond with good people, meet with my defenders, and engage in the beloved work I believe in.

Of course, I am very worried about the fate of the Golos movement, to which I have given 12 years of my life, and I cannot know what will happen to it after the verdict. But I do know that over these years, hundreds of thousands of knowledgeable and honest people have become observers. These thousands of my fellow citizens have not wasted their time while I have been locked up. They have continued, with enormous benefit to our country, to defend electoral rights and observe elections; during this time, nearly nine thousand election campaigns have taken place in Russia. This is a unique experience of citizen self-organisation, an inspiring example of civic engagement. And I am joyful to be part of this community.

There are those who doubt whether honest elections are possible, who doubt whether it is worth participating in them. These are fair questions. In moments of doubt, one should not forget that humans are not perfect, and therefore elections are not perfect. Elections reveal all the human vices we struggle against throughout our lives. Each of us daily makes a choice between kindness and malice, love and hatred, loyalty and betrayal, strength and weakness, generosity and greed, truth and falsehood, optimism and apathy, humility and pride, sincerity and self-interest, joy and despair, participation and indifference.

Our path is to make the right choice and to raise the level of honesty and common sense. Without you and me, elections cannot make themselves honest. People make them honest. Happy people. Observe, participate, rejoice more in life. Raise the level of honesty and common sense, drop by drop, step by step, day by day.

Thank you for listening to me so patiently. In closing, I want to wholeheartedly thank my loved ones, my defenders, colleagues, and the large number of kind people who support me and do not let me face injustice alone. For me, this means that what I did is needed and important to people, and therefore it was not all in vain.

Thank you!

Editor: Dmitry Tkachev