Three lawyers for Alexei Navalny, the Kremlin critic who died last year in an Arctic prison, were found guilty by a Russian court of belonging to an extremist group and jailed for several years.
Igor Sergunin, Alexei Liptser and Vadim Kobzev were tried behind closed doors in Petushki, east of Moscow, and sentenced respectively to three and a half years, five years and five and a half years.
Prosecutors accused the lawyers of “using their status” to pass on letters written by Navalny during his time in prison to his associates, allowing him to continue leading an “extremist organization,” according to independent Russian newspaper Novaya Gazeta.
in February last year while serving a 19-year sentence on extremism charges which he denied. The Russian prison service said the Kremlin denied involvement in his death, but many Western countries and Navalny’s allies placed the blame on Russian President Vladimir Putin.
Rights groups say the conviction of Navalny’s lawyers shows that the Kremlin continues to suppress opposition to Putin’s government and its
“By persecuting lawyers just for doing their jobs, Russian authorities are dismantling what remains of the right to legal defense and abusing what is a criminal justice system in name only,” Amnesty International said in a statement.
The group said the conviction was “a shameful attempt to silence those who dared to defend Navalny” and called for the lawyers’ unconditional release.
The lawyers were first arrested in October 2023 on charges of membership in an “extremist organization,” which Amnesty said was an “arbitrary designation” that the Kremlin applied to Navalny’s Anti-Corruption Foundation.
They join a number of Russians associated with Navalny who have been pursued by prosecutors since the opposition leader’s death. Last April, two Russian journalists, Konstantin Gabov and Sergey Karelin, were accused of producing content for Navalny’s YouTube channel, which publishes videos investigating Kremlin corruption that have racked up millions of views.
said on Friday (17) that lawyers are “political prisoners” who “must be released immediately”.
Navalny, Putin’s most formidable opponent, was arrested upon returning to Russia in 2021. He arrived from Germany, where he received treatment after being poisoned with Novichok, a Soviet-era nerve agent.
A joint investigation by CNN and the Bellingcat group implicated the Russian Security Service (FSB) in Navalny’s poisoning.
Navalny died just over a month before Putin was re-elected president in March last year.
