Russia sentences three lawyers of Alexei Navalny to jail. human rights news

Lawyers face up to five years in prison on charges of Navalny’s ties to groups the Kremlin considers “extremist.”

A Russian court has sentenced three lawyers defending late opposition leader Alexei Navalny to several years in prison.

Friday’s sentencing comes as Russia seeks to punish its allies following Navalny’s unexplained death in an Arctic prison colony in February 2024 amid a massive crackdown during its war on Ukraine.

A court in the city of Petrushki, about 100 km (60 miles) east of Moscow, sentenced Igor Sergunin, Alexey Liptser and Vadim Kobzev to prison terms ranging from three-and-a-half to five years for leaking the late opposition leader’s messages out of prison. The outside world.

The independent Russian newspaper Novaya Gazeta reported that Kobzev said in his final statement in court on 10 January that “we are being tried to pass on Navalny’s ideas to other people”.

He was arrested in October 2023 on charges of involvement with “extremist” groups, as Navalny’s network was deemed by authorities.

The case was widely seen as a way to increase pressure on the opposition to discourage defense lawyers from taking political cases.

At the time, Navalny was serving a 19-year prison sentence on multiple criminal charges, including extremism, which he has strongly denied.

Navalny’s network was deemed extremist following a 2021 ruling that outlawed his organizations – the Anti-Corruption Foundation and the Network of Regional Offices – as extremist groups.

That decision, which left anyone associated with the organizations open to prosecution, was condemned by Kremlin critics as politically motivated and designed to suppress Navalny’s activities.

According to Navalny’s associates, officials accused the lawyers of using their position to pass information from him to his team.

Navalny, an anti-corruption campaigner and outspoken opponent of President Vladimir Putin, was arrested in 2021 upon returning from Germany, where he was recovering from nerve agent poisoning blamed on the Kremlin.

In December 2023, Navalny was moved from a penal colony in the Vladimir region east of Moscow to a colony above the Arctic Circle, where he died under unknown circumstances the following February at the age of 47.

On Friday, his widow issued a statement demanding the “immediate” release of the three lawyers, describing them as “political prisoners”.

Two other lawyers, Olga Mikhailova and Alexander Fedulov, are on the wanted list but no longer live in Russia.