Interfax/RIA Novosti: Russian human-rights figures divided over Navalnyy sentence

(Interfax/RIA Novosti – December 30, 2014) Human-rights activists have greeted the conviction and sentencing of Aleksey Navalnyy and his brother for financial crimes with a mixture of anger and acceptance, with some denouncing it as politically-motivated hostage taking but others regarding it as justified.

Aleksey and Oleg Navalnyy were found guilty of fraud and money laundering by Moscow’s Zamoskvoretskiy court on 30 December. They were both sentenced to three and a half years in jail. For Aleksey it was suspended but for Oleg it was not and he will serve his time in a general prison colony.

“There were no grounds at all for either a suspended or a real jail term. This entire process is political,” Lyudmila Alekseyeva, Russia’s senior human-rights activist and head of the Moscow Helsinki Group, told Interfax news agency. “I think that Oleg has been a hostage to the situation because the whole case has been directed against Aleksey. They obviously did not want public demonstrations against a sen! tence on Aleksey and calculate that nobody will come out in aid of Oleg.”

Genri Reznik, a high-profile lawyer and chair of the Moscow Collegium of Advocates, described the sentence as a halfway house. “I thought they would acquit him and even had a bet with my wife on it,” he said, also to Interfax. “An acquittal would have been a powerful political move, as if to confirm what the Russian state says about our courts being independent, and it would have pulled the rug from under the feet of the judiciary’s critics.” Instead, he went on, “they’ve opted to not discredit the investigating bodies that have been behind all this, by handing down a halfway-house sentence.”

There is a logic to this, Reznik added: “Aleksey Navalnyy gets yet another warning and his brother Oleg is held hostage.”

But two other human-rights figures disagreed. “I think the verdict was clear and to be expected. From what I’ve seen in the public domain it seems quite fair,” Anton Tsvetkov, chair of the public safety commission at the Public Chamber, told RIA Novosti news agency. “This seems to be exactly what Navalnyy himself was fighting against: abuse of office, and what is the difference between this and what ‘RosPil’, which Navalnyy heads, is campaigning against?”

Mariya Kannabikh, a member of the Presidential Council for Civic Society and Human Rights, took a similar line. “We thought he’d get a tougher sentence but he remains at large and can work so that is a good thing,” she told RIA Novosti. “He is quite infamous so there could have been all kinds of factors at play … The court has been just in this case, I believe.”