Legal attorney has right to access to materials of the case he/she takes part in. Court states that legal attorney has right to access to materials of the case he/she takes part in. However, investigator continues issuing statements prohibiting information access. Is there any logic?

We shall remind that Mikhail Suprun, Professor, Heard of National History Department of the Pomorsky State University (Arkhangelsk), who worked with archive materials within a research project,was accused of two crimes: violating personal and family secrets (Art. 137 of the Criminal Code) and encouraging an official (the information center head in the Arkhangelsk department for internal affairs who assisted the scientist in his work) to power abuse (Art. 286).

Ivan Pavlov, IIFd Chair and Suprun’s legal attorney, asked the investigator to provide access to all case materials and to permit to copy some documents. The investigator stated to reject his request.

This statement was contested in the Primorsky district court of St.-Petersburg that made a decision in favor of the legal attorney (read about that here).

Happy end? No. The investigator makes one more prohibiting statement contradicting the court decision.

This time, Pavlov claimed to the deputy head of the North-Western investigative department of the Investigative Committee under the General Prosecutor’s Office, who satisfied the claim and cancelled the investigator’s statement.

Recently, a new statement has been received, signed by another investigator and satisfying Pavlov’s request for access to the case materials.

This battle between a legal attorney and investigative bodies started in September 2009 and ended in September 2010. It took a whole year to solve a question that seems so simple.

Texts of two last statements by investigative authorities (in Russian) are available at the Russian page.