On screen Vladimir Kara-Mourza during his trial in the Moscow court April 17, 2023. MAXIM SHEMETOV / Portal
The trial, at the end of which Russian opponent Vladimir Kara-Mourza was sentenced to 25 years in prison on Monday, April 17, took place behind closed doors – a classic procedure in cases of espionage or treason that allows secrets to be investigated should documents. Except that the prosecutor’s office did not produce any such document during the four-week hearings. She only cited Mr Kara-Mourza’s public speeches, three speeches in Lisbon, Helsinki and Washington, in which the politician referred to the “state terror”, election fraud, human rights violations or the invasion of Ukraine practiced by the Russian authorities. He concluded by calling on western capitals to impose sanctions on the leaders.
The prosecutor and then the judges of the Moscow City Court saw in these words “threats to the external security and territorial integrity” of Russia, among which the 41-year-old opponent, father of three, was sentenced to eighteen years in prison for “high treason”. to which are added seven years for “spreading false information about army operations” and three years for involvement in an “undesirable organization”. The Total Sentences Limitation Act, a sentence of 25 years imprisonment in a strict regime penal colony, was promulgated.
These legal sophistry seem ridiculous given the sinister equation this decision poses: Since surviving two poisonings in 2015 and 2017, Vladimir Kara-Mourza is a man in poor health who is forced to use a cane to walk to support. The severity of the sentence is therefore equivalent to a death sentence. His lawyers’ request for parole because of this deterioration in health (the adversary suffers from polyneuropathy and neuromuscular pathologies) has no chance of being enforced, nor does the intended appeal, despite the law expressly designating these diseases as incompatible with prison.
“He is an enemy of the state”
That didn’t stop the politician from showing his optimism: “Russia will be free, tell everyone that,” he told his lawyers seconds before being fired from the cage from which he was watching his trial. In his last words in court on April 10, Mr Kara-Mourza had delivered a speech in the form of a political will, in which he only regretted that he had failed to convince his fellow citizens of the “dangerousness” of Vladimir Putin’s regime. . “But I know there will come a day when the darkness that hangs over our country will lift,” he added.
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