Navalny's lawyers sentenced to years in Russian penal colony
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Three lawyers for the late opposition leader Alexei Navalny have been sentenced to years in a Russian penal colony. Igor Sergunin, Alexei Liptser and Vadim Kobzev were found guilty by a Russian court on Friday of belonging to an extremist group. The trio were arrested in October 2023 before being added to an official list of "terrorists and extremists".
They were sentenced respectively to three and a half, five and five and a half years after a trial held behind closed doors in the Vladimir region, east of Moscow. Yulia Navalnaya, the widow of the late Navalny, a staunch Vladimir Putin critic, said: "Vadim, Alexei and Igor are political prisoners and must be released immediately.".
Human rights activists say the prosecution of lawyers who defend people speaking out against the authorities and the war in Ukraine crosses a new threshold in the repression of dissent under the Russian president. "Lawyers cannot be persecuted for their work," rights group OVD-Info said in a statement.
"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 said Navalny's lawyers were 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".
