The political repression against Alexey Navalny does not seem to stop even within the prison walls. Putin’s number one opponent says he is spending almost every day in a detention cell: as soon as he has finished serving a period of solitary confinement, the detention center officials find an excuse to send him back inside him. These are continuous measures that are obviously considered an abuse, a violation of human rights, and that Navalny is trying to challenge in court.
“I’m sitting on a stool in a space of six square meters”
The latest punishment was announced today on the opponent’s social profiles: 14 days in jail for refusing to wash a prison fence. “And I went back to the punishment cell,” writes Navalny. “I just spent 12 days there, they give me 14 again. The reason is that I refused to wash the fence. Well, I understand that painting a fence and feeling like Tom Sawyer is fun – says the opponent with his usual sarcasm – but washing the fence, in my opinion, is total nonsense ».
Then Navalny says he is “sitting on a stool” in a space of “six square meters”. “All I have with me is a cup (a specimen), and a book (a specimen),” he explains, mocking the bureaucratic language of the prison. “But I’m already used to it. I don’t understand people who need other objects for a full life ».
“In the punishment cell for an unfastened button”
Over the past two months, Melekhovo’s strict IK-6 detention center – where Navalny is unjustly incarcerated for political reasons – has inflicted six such punishments on the Russian dissident: once they even made him spend three days in a prison cell. punishment only because the top button of his prison uniform was undone.
“12 days of isolation for criticizing the mobilization ordered by Putin “
At the end of September, Navalny was sentenced to 12 days of solitary confinement. He this time for having criticized the “partial” mobilization of the reservists ordered by Putin for the invasion of Ukraine, against which the former driver of the anti-Putin protests has urged to take to the streets.
“To maintain his personal power, Putin is harassing a neighboring country, he has killed people there and is now sending huge numbers of Russian citizens into this war,” Navalny denounced in video link with the court during a trial against the administration. of the prison where he is being held. “It’s all terrible – he said – a great tragedy”.
Amnesty International denounces, “Cruel and degrading treatment against Navalny”
But the continued isolation in the punishment cell is apparently not the only abuse that Navalny suffers behind bars. Last month, Amnesty International once again called for the immediate release of Putin’s best-known opponents, denouncing “deeply disturbing information on the increasingly harsh treatment of Alexey Navalny” in the prison where he is being held.
“This – says the NGO for the defense of human rights – includes severe penalties for alleged infractions and repeated attempts to ostracize by other prisoners who, according to reports, are not allowed to talk to him or even look at him. In serious violation of his rights and of Russian law itself, Alexey Navalny is not allowed confidential meetings with his lawyer. His health and his well-being are at grave risk, and this amounts to cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment ». According to Amnesty, the goal of the prison administration is to “break the spirit of Alexey Navalny by making his existence in the penal colony unbearable, humiliating and dehumanizing.”
The context
Navalny was arrested in January 2021, as soon as he returned to Moscow from Berlin, where he had been treated for a poisoning that he had long feared for his life and for which the Kremlin secret services are suspected.
Despite being (unfairly) behind bars, Navalny is arguably the Kremlin’s most feared opponent. In the past years he has organized numerous protests against Putin’s regime and the video-investigations of his Anti-Corruption Foundation have repeatedly embarrassed the Russian president and his entourage.
In recent times, however, the Russian government has tightened political repression and both the network of regional offices in Navalny and the Anti-Corruption Foundation have been declared “extremist” in Russia. A new and ferocious crackdown on civil liberties and dissent began with Putin’s atrocious invasion of Ukraine, and in Russia now a new “gag” law provides up to 15 years in prison for disseminating information on the army that should be deemed “false” by the authorities: in fact a way to prohibit criticism of the war.
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