A lawyer for opponent Alexei Navalny was not present at the hearing and could not be reached
A lawyer for Alexei Navalny missed a hearing for his client on Monday and was unavailable, his opponent’s team reports, three days after the arrest of three more of his defense lawyers. “Lawyer Alexander Fedulov was supposed to visit Alexei today [Navalny], but he has no longer been reachable since this morning,” wrote the exiled opponent’s spokeswoman, Kira Larmych, on X (ex-Twitter). “We don’t know where Fedoulov is, his phone is turned off,” she added.
The hearing is about another dispute between Mr. Navalny and his IK-6 penal colony in Melechovo, which he regularly accuses of violating his rights and which he takes to court. Three other lawyers who defended Mr. Navalny, Vadim Kobzev, Igor Sergunin and Alexeï Liptser, were arrested on Friday on charges of “extremism.”
The opponent’s supporters see this as an opportunity to further isolate him and believe that a new level of suppression of the opposition has been reached. So far, lawyers for opposition activists have rarely been detained, although they have faced increased surveillance and threats. In the last two years, several of them have left the country to avoid prosecution.
According to the independent site Mediazona, Alexei Navalny only learned on Monday from journalists present at the hearing, which took place via video conference, that his three lawyers had been arrested three days earlier. He requested a postponement of that hearing, saying he had “very little information about what was going on.” “Of course I will only get a lawyer if a lawyer comes to me, but since they are being arrested everywhere, I think no one will come,” he explained, quoted by Mediazona.
Alexei Navalny was arrested in January 2021 upon his return from Germany, where he was hospitalized after being the victim of poisoning in Russia. Since then he has been sentenced to heavy sentences, most recently in August to nineteen years in prison. Jail for “extremism”. “.