By Christian Edwards and Anna Chernova, CNN
The three lawyers who used to represent the late opposition leader Alexei Navalny: Igor Sergunin, Alexei Liptser and Vadim Kobzev (left to right in the defendants' cage), attend their verdicts reading in the town of Petushki in the Vladimir region on 17 January 2025. Photo: AFP / TATYANA MAKEYEVA
Three lawyers for Alexey Navalny, the Kremlin critic who died last year in an Arctic prison, have been found guilty by a Russian court of belonging to an extremist group and jailed for several years.
Igor Sergunin, Alexei Liptser and Vadim Kobzev were tried behind closed doors in Petushki, east of Moscow, and sentenced respectively to three-and-a-half, five and five-and-a-half years.
Prosecutors accused the lawyers of "using their status" to pass letters written by Navalny during his time in prison to his associates, allowing him to continue to head an "extremist organisation," according to the independent Russian newspaper Novaya Gazeta.
Navalny died suddenly in February last year while serving a 19-year sentence on extremism charges he denied. The Russian prison service said Navalny had "felt unwell after a walk" and the Kremlin denied involvement in his death, but many Western countries and Navalny's allies pinned the blame on Russian President Vladimir Putin.
Human rights groups say the sentencing of Navalny's associates shows the Kremlin is continuing to crack down on opposition to Putin's rule and his war in Ukraine.
"By targeting lawyers for merely doing their job, the Russian authorities are dismantling what remains of the right to legal defence and abusing what is a criminal justice system only in name," Amnesty International said in a statement.
The group said the sentencing was "a shameful attempt to silence those who dared to defend Navalny" and called for the lawyers' unconditional release.
The lawyers were first arrested in October 2023 on charges of participating in an "extremist organisation," which Amnesty said was an "arbitrary designation" the Kremlin applied to Navalny's Anti-Corruption Foundation.
They join a string of Russians associated with Navalny that have been pursued by prosecutors since the opposition leader's death. Last April, two Russian journalists, Konstantin Gabov and Sergey Karelin, were accused of producing content for Navalny's YouTube channel, which publishes videos investigating corruption in the Kremlin that have amassed millions of views.
Yulia Navalnaya, Navalny's widow, said on Friday that the lawyers are "political prisoners" who "must be released immediately."
Navalny, Putin's most formidable opponent, was imprisoned upon his return to Russia in 2021. He arrived from Germany, where he had received treatment after being poisoned with Novichok, a Soviet-era nerve agent. A joint investigation by CNN and the group Bellingcat implicated the Russian Security Service (FSB) in Navalny's poisoning.
Navalny died just over a month before Putin was re-elected as president in March last year.
- CNN
