Manana Aslamazyan does not cast a very threatening image. The Russian civil society organizer is intelligently calm, soft-spoken, and bears the distinctive eyewear of a schoolteacher, not your prototype of a dangerous social agitator. Perhaps for this reason so many of us were appalled by the Kremlin’s unfair persecution of Aslamazyan and her organization, the Educated Media Foundation, a group which has helped to train more than 15,000 broadcast journalists in the best practices of the trade. (A good background of this case has been done by the New York Review of Books). Last January Aslamazyan entered Russia carrying €9,500 ($15,000) without properly declaring it to customs – something that brought about swift criminal charges of smuggling in an effort that was largely perceived to be a pretext for shutting down her organization. During her forced exile in France, she resigned from her post at EMF, and told the press: “It seems that there’s a common attitude of suspicion toward nonprofit organizations financed abroad. We fell victim to this attitude. But we clearly worked within the legal structure of the Russian Federation, and we were extremely careful and accurate with all our documents and the registration of our funding.” However this week Aslamazyan was able to win an important court victory, as Russia’s Constitutional Court ruled that her arrest warrant was illegal. “The criminal case against Aslamazyan will be closed. She can come right now. No one is going to go after her. The arrest warrant will be cancelled,” said Irina Dudkina, head of the investigative committee’s press service. However, reports note that the media training organization has been successfully eliminated, and that Aslamazyan has no plans to revive EMF. More details after the cut.