Open Russia lawyers Sergey Badamshin and Haji Aliyev will represent Vladimir Romensky, TV Rain correspondent, and Nigina Beroyeva, freelance journalist in the case against the artist Petr Pavlensky.

Romensky and Beroyeva were detained on the night of November 8/9 together with Petr Pavlensky, who had organised an art-protest by the main entrance to the FSB security services building in Lubyanka Square, where he set fire to the doors. According to witnesses, entrance door no. 1 was left slightly damaged as a result.

All three were arrested at around two in the morning. After more than five hours of detention, Pavlensky was accused of disorderly conduct while the journalists were asked to explain an administrative infraction, and subsequently released. Romensky and Beroyeva currently have the status of witnesses. Petr Pavlensky remains at the Meshchansky Internal Affairs Department. He faces up to 15 days in prison. He is being defended by Agora, the inter-regional human rights association.

Given the law enforcement practices that have developed in the Russian Federation, human rights activists and experts are not ruling out the possibility of a criminal case being launched, with the more serious charge of arson.

The artist’s previous protests have gained him much notoriety. In 2012, he sewed his mouth shut with strands of coarse thread and stood for several hours outside the Kazan Cathedral in St Petersburg, with a poster declaring his support for Pussy Riot. In 2013, on Police Day, while sitting naked in front of the Lenin Mausoleum on Red Square, Moscow, he hammered a large nail through his scrotum, into the stone pavement. And in 2014, he sliced off his earlobe while sitting on the roof of the Serbsky State Scientific Centre for Social and Forensic Psychiatry in Moscow, in protest against the political abuse of psychiatry in Russia.