The judiciary in Russia ruled against three lawyers of opposition leader Alexei Navalny, accused of helping the latter communicate to the outside world from prison. The court judged that the lawyers were part of an “extremist group.”
Three persons – Vadim Kobzev, Alexei Liptser, and Igor Sergunin- were set aside since October 2023 under preliminary detention. The trial took place behind the closed doors: Kobzev received five and a half years, Liptser got five years, Sergunin received three-and-a-half years of prison time.
The court said the lawyers had “used their status as lawyers while visiting convict Navalny” in order to keep a flow of information going between Navalny and members of what the authorities described as an extremist community, including those on the run outside Russia.
The trial was held in a town about 72 miles east of Moscow, near the Pokrov prison. Kobzev said during the trial, “We are on trial for passing Navalny’s thoughts to other people.”
Yulia Navalnaya, the exiled widow of Navalny, celebrated the lawyers as political prisoners and called for their immediate freedom. She noted that they were some of the rare visitors who actually get to see or visit Navalny, who had been sentenced to 19 years.
For weeks, Navalny had been able to get his messages out to the public through texts he had asked his legal team to convey on his behalf and which then surfaced on social media.
Amnesty International denounced the sentencing as a “shameful attempt to silence those who dared to defend Alexei Navalny and amplify his voice from behind bars.”
Navalny, a staunch critic of President Vladimir Putin, died in February last year while serving his sentence in an Arctic prison camp. He was declared dead due to natural causes by Russian authorities, though media reports said he showed symptoms of poisoning before his death.
