Grigory Pasko: A Pastor Behind Bars
In Russia they’re accusing an American clergyman of arms smuggling By Grigory Pasko, journalist In Moscow, not far from the pretentiously ostentatious building of the state corporation «Rosatom», is found the plain and inconspicuous construction in which the «Slavic legal center» has made its home. At the entrance, on the security guard’s desk, I see a pile of magazines entitled «Religion and law». I find out that these magazines are published by the center. Later, it becomes clear that the editor-in-chief of the magazine, Anatoly Pchelintsev, and I know each other, having met once previously. Vladimir Ryakhovskiy, the managing director of the center, a former judge, now a lawyer, met me in his office. First we talked about the center: what it does, what cases the lawyers are working on, and so forth. It turned out that Ryakhovskiy and Pchelintsev were the lawyers in the famous case of the religious organization «Salvation Army» which was lost by Russia in the International Court of Human Rights (the essence of the case was that the Russian authorities had tried to prohibit the activities of this religious organization on the territory of the RF on the grounds that it could not call itself an “army”. An army, they had decided in Russia, could be only aviational, marine, or land).