After two decades of human rights activism I thought very few things occurring in the court room could actually surprise me. I was proved to be wrong. Court decision on the case of Ms. Olesia Sadovskaya dated May 23, 2016 did surprise me.

Ms. Drapeza, the head of the Education Department of Molodechno, brought a suit against Ms. Saovskaya in order to seize her foster daughter from the foster care of the respondent. The document reads that legal proceedings on the Ms. Sadovskaya case are suspended until a forensic DNA profiling will be conducted.

DNA profiling is a technique used in, for example, criminal investigation to identify a person or to place a person at a crime scene. It may be conducted after a lethal traffic accident to identify corps, for instance.

My first thought upon the reading of this court decision was that Olesia Sadovskaya is in danger of an impingement upon her. Since I was present in the court room when this decision was read out loud I remembered very well that the judge was talking about the forensic psychiatry examination, in addition to that there was no DNA mentioned amongst the questions addressed to the experts.

Does it mean that Ms. Drapeza’s influence is so powerful that the psychiatry expertise can be transformed into a genetic one? Possibly it is given some other strange facts about this case.

This time I am talking about the police report regarding the personality of Ms. Sadovskaya. Police inspector, who gave this report, Mr. Strezh, was rather a newcomer and was not long on his service by the time the report was requested. In the course of the last six months, since the case against Olesia was filed, he never met Ms. Sadovskaya. This did not stop him, however, from composing a report that informed the court’s decision.

There in few sentences the officer described Olesia as ‘being in contact with people of radical views – members of the opposition’.  The office also added that ‘she has tendencies to commit administrative offences’.

It was obvious in the court room that the inspector did not know the difference between the ‘radical’ and the ‘oppositional’ but knew very well that being branded as ‘opposition sympathizer’ can make one lose their job or studentship; however it was not enough to imprison someone. That must have been a disappointment since it was rather obvious that this report of his was written by request.

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