The leader of the political opposition in Russia, Alexei Navalny, faces another 30 years in prison for new charges brought against him. In this sense, he is accused of committing seven crimes defined in the Russian Criminal Code, amended in 2022, among which is “extremism”.
According to the German media DW, this Monday will begin the trial against the opponent of the regime of Vladimir Putin. The procedure will be carried out in the penal district of the Vladimir region, east of Moscow, where Navalny is already serving a nine-year sentence for fraud and contempt of court in a maximum security prison.
Alexei Navalny denounced the neglect of his health in prison: he was injected with “unknown drugs”
As a result of the new procedure, the man himself assured that faces up to three decades in prison in Russia on the new charges. In line with his statements, his partners also fear a severe verdict. “We assume that the trial will end relatively quickly and that Alexei will be sentenced to an unimaginable prison term of around 30 years,” Navalny’s spokeswoman Kira Yarmysh said in dialogue with DW.
In this sense, another of his allies, Leonid Volkov, also stated that a harsh verdict was inevitable. However, he stressed that the new case was different because of its exclusively political nature. “For the first time, Navalny is being tried for his political activityby virtue of the article relating to politics,” he stated in Novosti Showthe Russian-language podcast from DW.
Alexei Navalny (47) is in a Russian maximum security prison for fraud and contempt of court.
“Before, the Kremlin tried to say: ‘Yeah, he’s just a scammer, he stole everything he could, all the donations, just a thief.’ So they tried to highlight this as much as possible. The new case of Navalny is purely political, he is simply being tried for all his political activities, which the Kremlin retroactively declared extremist since 2011,” Volkov explained.
“In any case, we consider that all possible verdicts are illegal and that this whole case is completely fabricated. So of course we will do our best to let the whole world know, including protest actions,” Yarmysh added.
An alleged “opaque” trial for “lack of evidence”
Navalny’s associates stated that the trial will be discreet and that “we will only be informed of the verdict.”
Regarding the procedure, Yarmysh assured that the Russian authorities wanted to conduct the trial as discreetly as possible due to the “lack of evidence”, for which they had tried to hide it from the public. The preliminary hearing was postponed from May 31 to June 6, and then the location of the trial was changed, from the Moscow City Court to the Vladimir penal colony.
On June 5, Volkov predicted that the trial would not be public: “The trial will be as opaque as possible. We will only be informed of the verdict. The Kremlin will do everything possible to ensure that no information is leaked,” the woman said.
The new cause against Navalny consists of 196 volumes. The opposition politician is accused of violating seven articles of the Penal Code at the same time. The charges include the organization of an extremist group (his Anti-Corruption Foundation was declared an “extremist organization” on June 9, 2021), public calls for extremismthe rehabilitation of nazism and the involvement of minors in life-threatening activities (calls to rallies).
The European Court of Human Rights was in favor of Navalny
On the day of the preliminary hearing in Russia, the European Court of Human Rights of Strasbourg (ECtHR) announced its verdict on the lawsuit that Navalny’s lawyers filed in August 2020 for the refusal of the Russian authorities to investigate his poisoning that same year.
About, the court sided with the plaintiff and concluded that the European Convention on Human Rights had been violated. For that reason, he ordered Russia to pay 40,000 euros in damages to Navalny, thereby lowering the amount of 300,000 euros requested by the lawsuit, considered excessive by the court.
It will probably be impossible to make the Russian authorities pay this money. Added to this, the Russian Federation, which is no longer part of the Council of Europe or party to the Convention, does not recognize court decisions.
The new case against Navalny consists of 196 volumes and he is charged with seven counts.
However, Yarmysh said the decision was important. “It means that the court recognized that Alexei’s life was in danger and that it is the fault of the Russian Federation. Therefore, it is clear that this is an important decision purely from the point of view of justice and proves that our lawyers were right, despite all the refusals of the Russian courts to examine the case,” the spokeswoman said.
In addition, a representative of the Council of Europe told DW that this means that the court may consider the complaints filed by the Russians if they refer to violations of the rights of Russian citizens that took place before mid-September 2022. It was then that Russia ceased to be a party to the European Convention on Human Rights, six months after it announced its withdrawal from the Council of Europe.
mb / ds