Gold Cross of Merit, Poland (2015) Honorary Diploma of the Karelian Republic (2016) While in custody Sakharov Prize for "Journalism as an Act of Conscience", Moscow (2017) "Moscow Helsinki Group" award (2018) Yury Alexeyevich Dmitriev (Russian: Юрий Алексеевич Дмитриев; born 28 January 1956, Petrozavodsk) is a local historian and activist in Karelia (Northwest Russia).

[5] On 26 December 2017, a second assessment by a court-appointed body of the photographs of his foster daughter concluded that they contained no element of pornography and had been taken, as the accused insisted, to monitor the health of a sickly child.

Given a short sentence at the end of his second trial in July 2020, the verdict was overruled by the High Court of Karelia and the charges returned for an unprecedented third judicial examination.

Dmitriev and his lawyer Victor Anufriev battled through the courts in Petrozavodsk, St Petersburg and Moscow to have their appeal against the verdict and sentence heard.

[11] Dmitriev is known for his part in the discovery and investigation of two major burial sites, Sandarmokh and Krasny Bor, and their subsequent transformation into "informal" memorial complexes.

Yekaterina Klodt, Dmitriev's daughter by his first marriage, has described her father's determination to do as much as he possibly could to identify the victims buried in the anonymous and secret graves of the Stalin era.

[13] At first Dmitriev was junior partner to Ivan Chukhin (ru: Чухин, Иван Иванович), a deputy of the RSFSR Supreme Soviet and State Duma (1990-1995),[14] and the first chairman of the Memorial Society in Karelia.

On 1 July 1997, with members of St Petersburg Memorial, Dmitriev located a massive killing field, 12 kilometres from Medvezhyegorsk, that subsequently acquired the name of Sandarmokh; some weeks later, guided by local inhabitants, he confirmed the identification of the Krasny Bor execution site, 20 km from Petrozavodsk.

[17] As a result of Dmitriev's activities, he was appointed secretary of the Petrozavodsk Commission for Restoring the Rights of Rehabilitated Victims of Political Repression and in 2002 became (and remains) a member of the organisation of the same name at the republican level, covering all of Karelia.

[20] In 2015, he received the Gold Cross of Merit from Poland for his work in locating mass burials at Sandarmokh and on Solovki, and identifying the victims they contained: ethnic Poles in the Soviet Union were one of the nationalities targeted during the Great Terror.

[22] On 31 December 2017, Yury Dmitriev was one of 16 journalists, bloggers, writers and historians, imprisoned or otherwise persecuted by the authorities, who were recognised at the annual Sakharov awards in Moscow for "Journalism as an Act of Conscience".

[27] The explanation offered by Dmitriev for the existence of the 140 photographs, 9 of which are claimed by the prosecution to be pornographic, is that they record the improving health of a neglected and under-nourished little girl from a children's home, whom he and his second wife had taken into their care.

The alternative organisations proposed for this task, first by the prosecution and then by the judge, proved to be obscure private firms without the legal right to act as forensic experts.

[35] On 26 December 2017, the new court-appointed body finally presented the findings of its experts that there was no element of pornography in the photographs taken by Dmitriev and concluded that their purpose was to monitor the health of a sickly child.

Dmitriev had already been subject to psychiatric assessment in Petrozavodsk and there had been signs of a revival at the Serbsky Center of its well-documented Soviet-era use as an instrument of political punishment.

On 5 April 2018, Dmitriev was acquitted of the child pornography charges by Judge Marina Nosova at the conclusion of his trial at the Petrozavodsk City Court.

[42] Novaya Gazeta newspaper commented: "The decision was unprecedented for Russian justice where the percentage of acquittals does not exceed the statistical margin of error.

)[45] On 13 April 2018, the Petrozavodsk city prosecutor, Yelena Askerova, submitted a formal appeal to the court against the acquittal of Yury Dmitriev on all but one charge.

[47] Journalist Maria Eismont wrote that the trial of Yury Dmitriev in Petrozavodsk was "the most important thing happening in Russia right now".

[50] Among them were TV presenter and literary critic Alexander Arkhangelsky,[51] Natalya Solzhenitsyn,[52] film director Andrey Zvyagintsev, and the sculptor-designer of the Wall of Sorrow monument, Georgy Frangulyan, who commented: "What has happened [to Dmitriev] is appalling, it's tragic".

[53] On 28 June 2018, Yury Dmitriev was arrested again, apparently for breaking the terms of his release in April: he was stopped by police, travelling out of the city of Petrozavodsk to attend the funeral of a friend.

[55][56] On 20 September 2018, the Supreme Court of Karelia turned down an appeal from Dmitriev's lawyer Victor Anufriev to change the measure of restraint on his client from custody at Detention Centre No 1 to home arrest.

The first hearing of the new trial was scheduled to take place on that day, but was postponed until 27 September because the accused and his lawyer had not yet finished re-reading the case materials for the old charges.

[58] On 22 July 2020, Dmitriev was acquitted of producing pornography and the illegal possession of weapons, but found guilty of sexual assault against his adopted daughter.

After delay and resistance, the Supreme Court agreed to accept Dmitriev's appeal detailing procedural violations and opposing the drastic increase in the sentence.

Dmitriev lawyer Anufriev challenged this decision as an inadequate response to the 25 hefty case files of evidence, accumulated since June 2017, which had twice led to his client's effective acquittal.