Yevchen Lavrenchuk had never been to Italy until December last year, he says over the phone from Naples. That month he made a stopover in that southern Italian port city, en route from Tel Aviv, in Israel, to Lviv, in western Ukraine. But things went wrong in Naples. The Ukrainian opera director, who had worked in Russia for years as director of the Polish theater in Moscow, had no idea that Russia had put him on the Interpol list. He didn’t even know there was a charge against him in Russia.
The internationally renowned opera director was arrested in Italy on December 17 and imprisoned in the Poggioreale prison, one of the most notorious in the country. “The first week was the worst,” says Lavrentsjoek. “I was in a cell with ten men, including a murder suspect. I got infected with corona. I often meditate in silence to prepare my work as an opera director, but in the cell the TV was on the loudest volume day and night.” No one spoke English, or even Italian, and the police spoke only Neapolitan dialect. „It was such an absurd situation that I played an aria in my head Tuscanyby Puccini, sang: the part where painter-revolutionary Mario Cavaradossi is in prison.”
The red noticewhich the international police organization Interpol against Lavrenchuk is a worldwide request for police to take someone into pre-trial detention. Moscow accuses the director of stealing money from a private person eight years ago, as director of the Polish theater in Moscow. Lavrenchuk is known as a Putin critic and dismisses the charges as politically motivated.
Propaganda Purposes
On the phone, the director says that his problems with the Russian government started in 2014, when he refused to celebrate the annexation of Crimea and left Russia. Moscow, he says, is out to use people from the culture sector for propaganda purposes. “Three times the government tried to persuade me to take Russian nationality,” says Lavrentsjoek. Once he was taken to a building where a pile of documents was already waiting for him to sign, with which he would renounce his Ukrainian nationality. He refused, just as he says he always refused Russian government grants for the theatre. “And in Siberia, after a performance, I was taken to court for ‘promoting’ homosexuality,” the director recalls.
Interpol cannot oblige member states to act on a red notice, but in Italy arresting Interpol suspects is a “consolidated practice,” said Riccardo Noury of Amnesty International in Italy. Rome is doing so in the hope that other countries will also arrest its internationally registered mafia suspects. It is not the first time that Italy has arrested a dissident: in 2015, the Algerian human rights lawyer Rachid Mesli arrested, says Nouri. When an investigation revealed that Mesli was a political refugee in Switzerland, Italy released him.
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The same happened to the Ukrainian director, who was first transferred from a cell with ten men to a cell with four inmates, and was eventually placed under house arrest. But before that, the artist spent 35 days in a Neapolitan prison. It was only on Wednesday, March 2, two and a half months after his arrest, and after a question about the matter in parliament, did Italian Justice Minister Marta Cartabia decide that Lavrenchuk’s house arrest was lifted and that the director will not be deported to Russia. “And that while Interpol had already deleted the red notice on January 7,” says Lavrentsjoek’s lawyer, Alfonso Tatarano. On Thursday 3 March the director was another free man.
Right to defense
As a Putin critic, said Minister Cartabia, Lavrenchuk’s right of defense is not guaranteed in Russia. The director is relieved, but stumbles over the Italian formulation: “So I am actually free because Putin is now waging war in my country, not because I am innocent.” He will remain in Italy until the appeals court in Naples is likely to formalize his release on March 17.
Western governments and NGOs have accused the Kremlin for years of abusing Interpol to hunt down political dissidents worldwide. To prevent Russia from dealing with Ukrainian war refugees in western countries via this route, the United States, the United Kingdom and Canada, among others, have Monday asked Interpol to suspend Russia†
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