LAWYERS OF ALEXEI NAVALNY WIIL APPEAL AGAINST THE COURT RULING

Lawyer Olga Mikhailova, who represented the interests of Alexei Navalny, said that the court's decision would be appealed. We should remind our readers that the opposition leader was sentenced to 3.5 years in prison in connection with the Yves Rocher case.

The plans of the defense side are reported by the TASS agency. The scandalous trial ended the day before, on February 2, 2021 - the Moscow City Court considered the issue of replacement Navalny's suspended sentence with a jail one. The initiator of the proceedings was the Federal Penitentiary Service, where the oppositionist did not appear for registration in the fall of 2020, while being in Germany.

The Federal Penitentiary Service asked for 3.5 years in prison for Navalny, and the demand was satisfied.

Given the house arrest, under which the politician was in 2014, he will spend about 2.5 years in prison.

Navalny himself said in court that he was not hiding from the FPS representatives and was undergoing treatment, but his arguments were found untenable. We should recall that the verdict in the case of Yves Rocher against Navalny in 2017 was recognized by the European Court of Human Rights as “arbitrary and unreasonable”, with a violation of the right for a fair trial. The ECHR refused to consider the issue of the political motivation of the case, but the Navalny brothers received compensation in the amount of 76 thousand euros.

In 2018, the Presidium of the Supreme Court of the Russian Federation refused to cancel the sentence, the case was reopened. In 2019, the European Court of Human Rights recognized the house arrest of Alexei Navalny as "political", obliging Russia to pay him 20 thousand euros in moral compensation and over 2.5 thousand euros for legal costs.

Navalny will be sent to one of the prisons of the Central Federal District.

During the announcement of the verdict, the oppositionist himself smiled, and his wife Yulia Navalnaya, who was in the court room, burst into tears. After the trial, Navalny's supporters gathered in the center of Moscow and St. Petersburg, but the unauthorized actions were harshly suppressed by the security forces.