Russia’s Supreme Court requests that Chudnovets’s case for reposting child abuse video be reviewed

Russia’s Supreme Court has ordered the Presidium of Kurgan’s Regional Court to review the case against preschool teacher Yevgenia Chudnovets who was sentenced to six months in prison for reposting a video of a child being abused.

This decision was made in light of Deputy Prosecutor General Leonid Korzhinek’s February 23, 2017 speech before the country’s Supreme Court against Chudnovets’s verdict. In his presentation, Korzhinek argued that there was no corpus delicti in the case against Chudnovets.

In November 2016, Yevgenia Chudnovets – a preschool teacher from Ekaterinburg – was sentenced to six months in prison for “distributing child pornography.” The preschool teacher had posted a video of a naked child being bullied by camp counselors. The video showed counselors at a children’s camp in Kataysk mocking one of the wards. After the video’s publication, a counselor and the camp head were sentenced to terms of three and six years in prison respectively. Chudnovets herself had no connection to the video, but had simply shared it on a group in social network VKontakte.

Earlier, the prosecutor’s office asked that Chudnovets’ sentence be lessened, as she has a three-year-old son. The sentence also angered Russia’s Children’s Rights Commissioner Anna Kuznetsova.

In December 2016, another court reduced her sentence to five months.