A Moscow court has rejected Russian opposition figure Alexey Navalny’s appeal against a three-and-a-half-year jail term handed down for breaking the conditions of a suspended sentence over a contested 2014 embezzlement charge.
He was found guilty two weeks ago, following a dramatic sequence of events when he returned to Russia from Germany, where he had been living since an alleged poisoning attempt last summer.
Moscow City Court Judge Dmitry Balashov agreed with the prosecutor that the judgment should be upheld, and he should be sent to prison with the suspended sentence converted to a real custodial spell. Balashov took almost two months off the term, which means two and a half years, in practice, for Navalny, also allowing for time already served.
The three-and-a-half year sentence was initially handed down six years ago, after Navalny was found guilty of embezzling 30 million rubles ($400,000) from two companies, including the French cosmetics brand Yves Rocher. Navalny claims the case was politically motivated, and the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) has called the conviction "arbitrary and manifestly unreasonable."
At the time, the activist was in Germany, recovering from an alleged poisoning in Siberia last August. However, according to a report published by his Berlin doctors in the British medical journal The Lancet, Navalny had mostly recovered by that time. According to the FSIN, this means he should have been able to attend his appointment in Moscow.
Just as in his previous hearings, Navalny's court case was attended by diplomats from many third parties, as well as representatives from western media outlets. However, this time, there were no protests outside the courthouse.
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source https://www.rt.com/russia/516126-court-denies-navalny-appeal/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=RSS
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