Three lawyers who represented jailed Kremlin critic Alexei Navalny were convicted this week of participating in an “extremist organisation” by a court in the town of Petushki. Vadim Kobzev, Alexei Liptser, and Igor Sergunin were found guilty and sentenced to between three and a half and five and a half years in prison. The case has alarmed rights groups who fear Moscow will ramp up trials against legal representatives in addition to jailing their clients.
Three lawyers who represented jailed Kremlin critic Alexei Navalny were convicted this week of participating in an “extremist organisation” by a court in the town of Petushki. Vadim Kobzev, Alexei Liptser, and Igor Sergunin were found guilty and sentenced to between three and a half and five and a half years in prison. The case has alarmed rights groups who fear Moscow will ramp up trials against legal representatives in addition to jailing their clients.
This crackdown comes amid a widespread attempt to stifle dissent during the Ukraine offensive. The Kremlin has sought to punish Navalny’s associates even after his unexplained death in an Arctic prison colony last February. Kobzev, Liptser, and Sergunin were among the few people who visited Navalny in prison while he served his 19-year sentence. Navalny, Putin's main political opponent, communicated with the outside world through his lawyers, who then published his messages on social media. The US state department, Britain’s foreign secretary, France’s foreign ministry, and Germany have all condemned the verdict, calling it an act of intimidation against the legal profession and a further attempt to silence dissent. The lawyers were sentenced after a closed-door trial in Petushki, about 70 miles east of Moscow, near the Pokrov prison where Navalny was held before being moved to a remote colony above the Arctic circle. “We are on trial for passing Navalny’s thoughts to other people,” Kobzev said in court last week, according to the Novaya Gazeta newspaper. The court statement said the three had “used their status as lawyers while visiting convict Navalny … to ensure the regular transfer of information between the members of the extremist community, including those wanted and hiding outside the Russian Federation, and Navalny”. It claimed this allowed Navalny to plan “crimes with an extremist character” from his maximum-security prison. Kobzev compared Moscow’s current crackdown on dissent to Stalin-era mass repression. “Eighty years have passed … and in the Petushki court, people are once again on trial for discrediting officials and the state agencies,” he said. The OVD rights group that monitors political repression in Russia said the sentences showed Moscow was now intent on making defending political prisoners – a practice that is still allowed but becoming more difficult – outright dangerous. “The authorities are now essentially outlawing the defence of politically persecuted people,” the group said, a move that “risks destroying what little is left of the rule of law”
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