Unfair prosecution of Alexey Navalny and Petr Ofitserov
/Alexey Navalny. Photo copyright of Evgenly Isaev, Creative Commons Licence, Flickr
Navalnyy and Ofitserov v Russian Federation (Appl. No. 46632/13) and Navalnyy v Russian Federation (App.No 101/15)
Documents from the November 2021 briefing:
Power point presentation by Anna Maralyan, Centre de la Protection Internationale
Documents from the November 2017 briefing:
EIN briefing for the Committee of Ministers
Judgment of the European Court of Human Rights
The case concerned a complaint of arbitrary and unfair criminal proceedings that led to a conviction for embezzlement of property belonging to a Russian state company Kirovles by a prominent opposition politician and anti-corruption activist Alexey Navalny and a businessman Petr Ofitserov. The Court found a violation of the right to a fair trial under Article 6 of the Convention, noting that the trial was conducted ‘without judicial examination’ and the judgement of the Russian courts had been prejudicial, establishing ‘a link to public activities’ of Mr Navalny.
The Navalnyye case concerns the criminal conviction in 2014 of Mr Aleksey Navalnyy and his brother, Mr Oleg Navalnyy, of commercial fraud and money laundering. The applicants’ company, GPA, had concluded contracts with two companies, Yves Rocher Vostok and MPK, for freight forwarding and logistical services.
Aleksey Navalny, co-applicant and Founder of the Anti-Corruption Foundation, and Nikita Kulachenkov, Investigations, Anti-Corruption Foundation argued that the individual measures taken, i.e., the re-opening of the case that led to the conviction of Mr Navalny, was not effective as the re-trial was simply repeated with the identical violations of fair trial. The Committee was invited to establish that the re-opening of the proceedings as a result of an ECtHR judgment entails the proceedings to be wholly compliant with Convention norms, including fair trial.