Human rights organization Amnesty International Calls on “world leaders, international organizations and people around the world to make their voices heard, not only calling for Aleksei Navalny’s immediate release, but also for an end to the brutal reprisals against his supporters.” According to Amnesty, Russians deserve “to be able to make their voices heard without fear of reprisals.”
Amnesty itself was discredited last year when it no longer wanted to consider Navalny a prisoner of conscience, because of nationalistic statements in the past. In May Amnesty reversed that decision and acknowledged it had made a wrong decision.
Navalny assumes that he will still be incarcerated for the time being, even if his current sentence is over. Moscow is pursuing more lawsuits against him. “I don’t know when my journey will end, or if it will end at all.”
‘extremists’
Last year the entire organization of Navalny was labeled as extremist, and thus placed on a par with groups such as al-Qaida and IS. Allies of Navalny have been arrested or fled abroad.
As of Friday, Navalny’s associates Leonid Volkov and Ivan Zhdanov were added to the Russian list of extremists. They are both outside Russia. Volkov is known in the Netherlands because a comedian affiliated with the Kremlin if he showed up in a digital conversation with the House of Representatives and made strange statements.
Human Rights Prize
With such tactics, the Russian regime is trying to discredit dissident media organizations and activists. They are labeled ‘foreign agent’, which puts them under close scrutiny, or labeled ‘extremist’, after which all their activities become illegal.
In June, VTimes, one of the last independent Russian media outlets, decided to shut down. In December Memorial was banned, one of the oldest human rights organizations in Russia. Memorial kept lists of political prisoners, such as Navalny.
One of the founders of Memorial was physicist and Nobel laureate Andrei Sakharov. The Sakharov Prize is also named after him, which the European Parliament awards every year to someone who works for human rights and freedom of expression.
From winner of the Sakharov Prize in 2021? Alexei Navalny.
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