Yelena Maglevannaya

Who is Yelena Maglevannaya?

Yelena Maglevannaya is a Russian free-lance journalist for the newspaper Svobodnoye Slovo, Free Speech, in Volgograd. She has requested a political asylum in Finland on May 2009. Maglevannaya has focused on cases of persecution against Chechens.

Maglevannaya published an article of a Chechen Zubayr Zubayraev, detained in Volgograd since 2007, in Civitas.ru, Svobodnoye Slovo and later on the web page of the Islamic Committee of Russia. The article criticized the conditions and ill-treatments in prisons. On February 18, 2009, the administration of Volgograd set a suit against Maglevannaya for “honour and business reputation protection”, accusing her of spreading disinformation on torture of Mr. Zubayraev. Court of Volgograd ruled that Maglevannaya had spread false information, and ordered to pay 200,000 rubles as a compensation for moral damage to the administration of Volgograd prison colony LIU-15.

Also, Maglevannaya has received a death threat on the web site of a nationalist group Russian Nationwide Union. Maglevannaya claims that she was threatened to be sent to a mental hospital if she continued to write.