Three attorneys for the late opposition chief Alexei Navalny have been sentenced to years in a Russian penal colony.
Igor Sergunin, Alexei Liptser and Vadim Kobzev had been discovered responsible by a Russian court docket on Friday of belonging to an extremist group.
The trio had been arrested in October 2023 earlier than being added to an official record of “terrorists and extremists”.
They had been sentenced respectively to a few and a half, 5 and 5 and a half years after a trial held behind closed doorways within the Vladimir area, east of Moscow.
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Alexei Navalny was Vladimir Putin’s most distinguished Russian critic. Pic: AP
Yulia Navalnaya, the widow of the late Navalny, a staunch Vladimir Putin critic, stated: “Vadim, Alexei and Igor are political prisoners and must be released immediately.”
Human rights activists say the prosecution of attorneys who defend individuals talking out in opposition to the authorities and the battle in Ukraine crosses a brand new threshold within the repression of dissent underneath the Russian president.
“Lawyers cannot be persecuted for their work,” rights group OVD-Information stated in an announcement.
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Yulia Navalnaya has stated she’s going to return to the nation at some point and run for president. Pic: AP
“Pressure on defence lawyers risks destroying the little that remains of the rule of law, whose appearance the Russian authorities are still trying to maintain.”
It stated Navalny’s attorneys had been being prosecuted “only because the letter of the law still matters to them and they did not leave the man alone with the repressive machine”.
Navalny, who died out of the blue aged 47 in an Arctic penal colony in February final 12 months, was himself convicted of extremism and different costs, all of which he stated had been manufactured by authorities to silence his criticism of Putin.
The Kremlin says it doesn’t touch upon particular person court docket circumstances, however authorities have lengthy sought to painting Navalny and his supporters as Western-backed traitors in search of to destabilise Russia.
Regardless of his imprisonment, Navalny was helped by his attorneys to submit on social media and file frequent lawsuits over his therapy in jail, utilizing the ensuing authorized hearings as a possibility to proceed talking out in opposition to the federal government and the battle.
The attorneys had been accused of enabling him to proceed to operate because the chief of an “extremist group”, even from behind bars, by passing his messages to the skin world.
In court docket, a lady shouted “Boys, you are heroes” and supporters applauded the three males, standing collectively in a barred cage, after their sentencing.
Ms Navalnaya alleges her husband was murdered on Putin’s orders, an accusation that the Kremlin has strongly denied.
She herself is needed in Russia for alleged extremist exercise however has stated she hopes to return to the nation at some point and run for president.
