Russian court explains decision not to jail Kremlin critic Navalnyy

(Interfax – January 12, 2015) A Russian court has explained its decision to give a suspended sentence to anti-corruption campaigner and Kremlin critic Aleksey Navalnyy while jailing his brother, Oleg, Interfax news agency reported on 12 January.

Interfax quoted Moscow’s Zamoskvoretskiy court saying that “in handing down punishment, the court took into account the actual facts in the case, information about the defendants’ characters, the nature of the act committed by them, the role of each of them in the committed crime”.

On 30 December 2014, Zamoskvoretskiy court found the Navalnyy brothers guilty of defrauding a Russian subsidiary of the French cosmetics company Yves Rocher. Unexpectedly, Aleksey Navalnyy, who had already been serving a suspended sentence after his conviction of embezzlement in 2013 and was under house arrest, only received a new suspended sentence, while his brother was sent to prison.

Interfax explained that under Russia’s Criminal Code a person serving a suspended sentence can be given a new suspended sentence. A suspended sentence cannot be given to a person who has committed “a grievous or a particularly grievous crime during a probation period following a suspended sentence”, while Navalnyy “was found guilty of committing crimes of low and medium severity”, court spokeswoman Yuliya Petrova said.

She also said that the court had turned down four requests from Russia’s Federal Service for the Administration of Punishment (FSIN) to change Navalnyy’s status after he repeatedly left his flat in violation of the terms of his house arrest, Interfax said in a separate report on 12 January.

“Issues to do with the legality of actions of Aleksey Navalnyy… can be subject of an examination and evaluation only as part of an appeal hearing of grievances or representations,” she said.