Russia on Friday sentenced three lawyers who defended Alexei Navalny to several years in prison for transmitting messages from the late opposition leader to the outside world.
The case, which comes amid widespread repression of dissent during the Ukraine offensive, has alarmed rights groups who fear Moscow will speed up trials against legal representatives in addition to imprisoning their clients. .
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The Kremlin has sought to punish Navalny’s associates even after his unexplained death in an Arctic penal colony last February.
Vadim Kobzev, Alexei Liptser and Igor Sergunin were found guilty of participating in an “extremist organization” by a court in the town of Petushki.
Kobzev, the most high-profile member of Navalny’s legal team, was sentenced to five and a half years, while Liptser was sentenced to five years and Sergunin to three and a half years.
These sentences aroused indignation in the West.
The trio were almost the only people to visit Navalny in prison while he served his 19-year sentence.
Navalny, Putin’s main political opponent, communicated with the world by transmitting messages through his lawyers, which his team then published on social media.
Sending letters and messages through lawyers is normal practice in Russian prisons.
Navalny’s exiled widow, Yulia Navalnaya, said the lawyers were “political prisoners and should be released immediately.”
– ‘New low point’ –
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The United States, France, Germany and Britain have all criticized the convictions.
“This is yet another example of the Kremlin’s persecution of defense lawyers in its efforts to undermine human rights, subvert the rule of law and suppress dissent,” the Kremlin spokesperson said. US State Department, Matthew Miller, in a statement.
The French Foreign Ministry called the court ruling “a new act of intimidation against the legal profession as a whole”, while Germany said that “even those who are supposed to defend others before the law face harsh persecutions.”
British Foreign Secretary David Lammy called on the Kremlin to “release all political prisoners”.
The lawyers were convicted after a closed-door trial in Petushki, about 115 kilometers east of Moscow, near the Pokrov prison where Navalny was held before being transferred to a remote colony in above the Arctic Circle.
“We are being tried for transmitting Navalny’s thoughts to other people,” Kobzev said in court last week, the Novaya Gazeta newspaper reported.
A court statement said they “used their status as lawyers during their visit to the condemned Navalny… to ensure the regular transfer of information between members of the extremist community, including those wanted and hiding in outside the Russian Federation, and Navalny”.
He said this allowed Navalny to plan “crimes of an extremist nature” from his maximum security prison.
In his messages, Navalny denounced the Kremlin’s offensive in Ukraine as “criminal” and asked his supporters to “not give up.”
Navalny was himself a lawyer and was known for his sardonic speeches in court, attempts to take officials to court and lengthy legal tirades challenging prosecutors.
He denounced the arrest of his lawyers in October 2023 as an attempt to further isolate him.
Kobzev last week compared Moscow’s current crackdown on dissent to the mass repression of the Stalin era.
“Eighty years have passed… and in the Petushki court, people are being tried again for discrediting state officials and agencies,” he said.
– ‘To scare you’ –
The OVD rights group that monitors political repression in Russia said the convictions showed that Moscow now intends to make the defense of political prisoners – a practice still permitted but increasingly difficult – downright dangerous.
“The authorities now essentially ban the defense of politically persecuted people,” the group said, a move that “risks destroying what little remains of the rule of law.”
Last week, Navalnaya said Russia had refused to remove her husband from its list of terrorists and extremists despite his death.
She published a letter in December from Russian financial watchdog Rosfinmonitoring addressed to Navalny’s mother, saying her son was still under investigation for money laundering and “terrorism financing.”
“Why does Putin need this? This is obviously not about preventing Alexei from opening a bank account,” Navalnaya said.
“Putin is doing this to scare you.”
