The Moscow city court on November 30 rejected appeals filed by theater director Yevgenia Berkovich and playwright Svetlana Petriichuk against an extension of their pretrial detention on charges of justifying terrorism with the production of the play Finist-The Brave Falcon, about Russian women who married Muslim men and moved to Syria.
The court upheld a lower court decision in early November to extend the two women's pretrial detention until at least January 10.
During the hearing, Berkovich expressed gratitude "to all who were involved" for allowing her to travel from a Moscow detention center to St. Petersburg to attend the burial of her grandmother, noted human rights defender Nina Katerli, who died at the age of 89 on November 20.
However, Berkovich said "the act of mercy had tuned into an act of torture" as while being transported to the funeral she spent 25 hours in "a cage of avtozak" -- a special vehicle designed for transporting suspects and convicts, which affected her health.
"I did not have warm clothes with me because I was not aware where I was going and my lawyers did not know. It was a cage -- a piece of an iron cage 1 meter by 2 meters, in which it is not possible to stand or properly sit. Because of that, it is painful for me to stand up or sit down. It was not possible to sleep there either as there was no heating.... For those 25 hours, I was allowed to get out to a toilet only twice," Berkovich said.
But Judge Oksana Nikishina rejected Berkovich's complaints, saying that she should be grateful that she was allowed to attend her grandmother's burial at all.
Katerli, who defended several high-profile persons at politically motivated trials, including Mikhail Khodorkovsky and other former leaders of the Yukos oil company in the early 2000s, was buried in St. Petersburg on November 25.
Berkovich and Petriichuk were arrested in May. They both maintain their innocence. If convicted, they face up to five years in prison.