Our defendant Y.B. was arrested in Armenia based on an international arrest warrant issued by the Russian Federation. She was accused of committing five counts of large-scale fraud in Russia and was requested to be extradited under the 1993 Minsk Convention on Legal Assistance and Legal Relations in Civil, Family, and Criminal Matters. In this case, our team of lawyers managed to achieve a victory, thanks to which Y.B. was not extradited to Russia. Initially, the court rejected the motion for detention submitted by the Ministry of Justice of Armenia, and Y.B. was immediately released from the courtroom. This victory paved the way for the next success when the Ministry of Justice granted our motion and rejected the request to extradite Y.B. to Russia.
The peculiarity of this case was that our team managed to demonstrate that the charges brought against Y.B. in Russia were not sufficiently specific, which implies that the alleged act attributed to her was not substantiated as a crime in Armenia. Such a ground for refusal of extradition is a unique case in the practice of Armenia.
