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Three legal professionals for the late opposition chief Alexei Navalny have 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 have been arrested in October 2023 and added the next month to an official checklist of “terrorists and extremists”.
They have 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.
“Vadim, Alexei and Igor are political prisoners and should be launched instantly,” Yulia Navalnaya, the widow of the late politician, posted on X.
Human rights activists say the prosecution of legal professionals who defend folks talking out towards the authorities and the conflict in Ukraine crosses a brand new threshold within the repression of dissent beneath President Vladimir Putin.
“Legal professionals can’t be persecuted for his or her work. Strain on defence legal professionals dangers destroying the little that is still of the rule of regulation, whose look the Russian authorities are nonetheless making an attempt to take care of,” rights group OVD-Information mentioned in a press release.
It mentioned Navalny’s legal professionals have been being prosecuted “solely as a result of the letter of the regulation nonetheless issues to them and they didn’t go away the person alone with the repressive machine”.
America condemned the sentencing of legal professionals “who have been merely doing their jobs to make sure a political prisoner was afforded his proper to authorized illustration,” the State Division mentioned.
Navalny, who died instantly aged 47 in an Arctic penal colony in February final 12 months, was himself convicted of extremism and different prices, all of which he mentioned have been trumped up by the authorities to silence his criticism of Putin.
The Kremlin says it doesn’t touch upon particular person courtroom instances. Authorities have lengthy forged Navalny and his supporters as Western-backed traitors in search of to destabilise Russia.
APPLAUSE IN COURT
Regardless of his imprisonment, Navalny was in a position through his legal professionals to publish on social media and file frequent lawsuits over his therapy in jail, utilizing the ensuing authorized hearings as an opportunity to maintain talking out towards the federal government and the conflict.
The legal professionals have been accused of enabling him to proceed to perform because the chief of an “extremist group”, even from behind bars, by passing his messages to the surface world.
In courtroom, a lady shouted “Boys, you’re heroes” and supporters applauded the three males, standing collectively in a barred cage for the defendants, after their sentencing.
Yulia Navalnaya final month printed video of secretly recorded conferences between Navalny and the legal professionals in jail, one thing she mentioned was unlawful as a result of an accused particular person has the precise to confer privately with a lawyer. Russia’s federal jail service didn’t reply to a request for remark.
Navalnaya mentioned the recordings have been made by the authorities and handed to her group after it supplied a reward for folks to come back ahead with details about Navalny’s demise.
She alleges her husband was murdered on Putin’s orders, an accusation that the Kremlin has strongly denied. Navalnaya herself is needed in Russia for alleged extremist exercise however has mentioned she hopes to return to the nation sooner or later and run for president.
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