Three legal professionals for the late opposition chief Alexei Navalny had been discovered responsible by a Russian courtroom on Friday of belonging to an extremist group and sentenced to years in a penal colony.
Igor Sergunin, Alexei Liptser and Vadim Kobzev had been arrested in October 2023 and added the next month to an official checklist of “terrorists and extremists”.
They had been sentenced respectively to 3-1/2, 5 and 5-1/2 years after a trial held behind closed doorways within the Vladimir area, east of Moscow.
Human rights activists say the prosecution of legal professionals who defend folks talking out in opposition to the authorities and the struggle in Ukraine crosses a brand new threshold within the repression of dissent beneath President Vladimir Putin.
“It is a gross violation of the very ideas of regulation,” stated Pervy Otdel (First Division), a authorized affiliation that represents folks accused of grave crimes.
“Attorneys will not be companions or accomplices of their shoppers; they supply them with defence, the suitable to which is enshrined within the structure of Russia.”
Navalny, who died all of the sudden in an Arctic penal colony in February final 12 months, was himself convicted of extremism and different prices, all of which he denied. His spouse Yulia Navalnaya has described the legal professionals as political prisoners and stated they had been arrested for merely doing their job.
The Kremlin says it doesn’t touch upon particular person courtroom circumstances, however authorities have solid Navalny and his supporters as Western-backed traitors searching for to destabilise Russia.
Regardless of his imprisonment, Navalny was in a position by way of his legal professionals to submit on social media and file frequent lawsuits over his therapy in jail, utilizing the ensuing authorized hearings as an opportunity to maintain talking out in opposition to the federal government and the struggle.
The legal professionals had been accused of enabling him to proceed to operate because the chief of what the federal government referred to as an extremist group, even from behind bars, by passing his messages to the surface world.
Yulia Navalnaya final month printed video of secretly recordings between Navalny and the legal professionals in jail, one thing she stated was unlawful as a result of an accused particular person has the suitable to confer privately with a lawyer. Russia’s federal jail service didn’t reply to a request for remark.
Navalnaya stated the recordings had been made by the authorities however handed to Navalny’s crew after they supplied a reward for folks to return ahead with details about his dying.
