Navalny moved to ‘bad’ penal colony
POKROV (Russia): Kremlin critic Alexei Navalny has been transferred to a penal colony outside Moscow to serve his prison sentence, weeks after he returned to Russia after being poisoned.
His whereabouts had been unknown since Thursday when allies learnt that he was transferred out of one of Moscow’s most infamous jails.
Navalny, 44, was arrested on his return from Germany last month and has been sentenced to more than two-and-a-half years for parole violations that he said were trumped up.
He has been transferred to a penal colony in the Vladimir region, the Moscow Public Monitoring Commission that defends the rights of prisoners and has access to people in custody, said on its website.
The state news agency TASS specified that Navalny will serve his term in penal colony number 2 in the town of Pokrov, about 100km east of Moscow.
State news agency RIA Novosti reported that the colony is “strict” regarding “disciplinary compliance”, and that Navalny will find it difficult to make calls, with cell phones banned and a payphone that often does not work.
TASS cited an unnamed source as saying that the Kremlin critic will have the option of working as a cook, librarian, mask sewer or machinist.
Ruslan Vakhapov, a local activist of the prisoners’ rights group Jailed Russia, described conditions as particularly severe.
“In short, it’s a bad colony,” Ruslan Vakhapov said by phone.
Many prisoners cooperate with the colony administration and help them to control other inmates closely, abusing them if they violate a strict daily schedule, he said.
“If there is a need to prevent Navalny from communicating with others, nobody would talk to him,” the activist said.
“(If anything happens), he wouldn’t be able to ask for help until his lawyer arrives,” he added. — Agencies