Navalny remanded in custody following arrest
AJUDGE ordered Alexei Navalny to be remanded in custody for 30 days, the Russian opposition leader’s spokeswoman Kira Yarmysh said on Twitter yesterday.
The ruling concluded an hourslong court hearing set up at a police precinct where the politician was held since his arrest at a Moscow airport on Sunday.
Mr Navalny flew to Russia from Germany, where he had spent five months recovering from nerve agent poisoning that he blames on the Kremlin. He was detained at passport control at Sheremetyevo airport after arriving on Sunday evening from Berlin, where he was treated following the poisoning in August.
Mr Navalny’s arrest prompted a wave of criticism from United States and European officials. German foreign minister Heiko Maas noted that
Mr Navalny had returned of his own volition and said “it is completely incomprehensible that he was detained by Russian authorities immediately after his arrival”.
“Russia is bound by its own constitution and by international commitments to the principle of the rule of law and the protection of civil rights,” Mr Maas added. “These principles must of course also be applied to Alexei Navalny. He should be released immediately.”
The politician’s allies said he was being held at a police precinct outside Moscow and has been refused access to his lawyer. The court hearing into whether Mr Navalny should remain in custody was hastily set up at the precinct itself, and the politician’s lawyers said they were notified minutes before.
“It is impossible, what is happening over here,” Mr Navalny said in video from the improvised court room, posted on his page in the messaging app Telegram. “It is lawlessness of the highest degree.”
Calls for Mr Navalny’s immediate release have come from European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, the office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, UK Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab and top officials of other EU nations.
US President-elect Joe Biden’s pick for national security adviser called on Russian authorities to free Mr Navalny.
“Mr Navalny should be immediately released, and the perpetrators of the outrageous attack on his life must be held accountable,” Jake
Sullivan wrote on Twitter, while the outgoing US secretary of state, Mike Pompeo, said the US “strongly condemns” the decision to arrest Mr Navalny.
Nevertheless, the judge ordered that Mr Navalny be remanded in custody until February 15, Ms Yarmysh said on Twitter. Mr Navalny’s lawyer, Vadim Kobzev, told the Interfax news agency that the defence plans to appeal against the ruling.
Mr Navalny’s detention was widely expected because Russia’s prisons service said he had violated probation terms from a suspended sentence on a 2014 money-laundering conviction.
The prisons service said it would seek to have Mr Navalny serve his three-and-a-half-year sentence behind bars.