[Editor’s note: last week there were reports of a shocking story from Russia of a journalist, Yelena Maglevannaya, being convicted of libel for having written about alleged abuse and torture of one Chechen inmate. Today, our correspondent Grigory Pasko catches up with her to discuss the incident. – James]

The Gulag can never be guilty?
Journalist who wrote about the beatings of convicts in places of detention has been convicted in Russia
Grigory Pasko, journalist

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On May 13th a court in Volgograd ruled that human rights activist and journalist Yelena Maglevannaya will have to pay 200,000 rubles in moral compensation to the Administration of the Federal Service for the Execution of Punishments (UFSIN) for a series of her publications, supposedly for besmirching the reputation of one of the institution’s clinical wards. Likewise the court obligated the journalist to write a retraction of her article in one of Russia’s key publications.

Following this incident the Russian newspaper Izvestiya, already well known to readers of the blog, afterwards published an article which did not hide its obvious sympathies toward the UFSIN. In particular, the article quoted Irina Antonova, the regional assistant chief of GUFSIN for observance of human rights in prisons, who asserts that the convict whom the journalist had defended as “a physically strong person, close to two meters in height, in the past a master of sport in freestyle wrestling and an instructor in hand-to-hand combat…” (As though the FSIN prison guards wouldn’t be able to pummel such an individual). Antonova continued with her opinion that “he is not as simple as he’d like to look, and has influential patrons. In my view he is determined to get himself transferred to serve his term to the Chechen Republic.“

I telephoned Yelena in Volgograd and asked her several questions.

1. What is your version of what happened? Why did the FSIN decide in the first place to turn to the court for help?