Alexei Navalny’s life in danger, needs to be evacuated: UN Rights Experts

Four UN rights experts said that Kremlin critic Alexei Navalny’s ‘life is in serious danger’ and called for his urgent medical evacuation from Russia, AFP reports. 

Referring to Navalny’s deteriorating health, the experts stressed that ‘the Russian government is accountable for Navalny’s life and health while he is in detention’. They asked for his immediate evacuation for urgent medical treatment abroad. 

The four independent experts on the issues of freedom of expression, torture, extrajudicial executions and the right to physical and mental health believe that Navalny is being given inhuman treatment.

“We are deeply troubled that Navalny is being kept in conditions that could amount to torture or cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment,” they said. speaking on behalf of the United Nations. 

Navalny, who is on hunger strike in a Russian penal colony, has been incarcerated under harsh conditions without adequate medical care and has been barred from seeing doctors of his own choosing, they said.

Their comments came as protests gathered for a series of nationwide demonstrations in support of Navalny, with police moving quickly to make arrests, including key aides of the jailed opposition figure.

Navalny was detained when he returned to Russia in January after months recovering in Germany from a near-fatal nerve agent poisoning he blames on the Kremlin — an accusation it rejects.

He was sentenced to two-and-a-half years on old fraud charges his supporters say were politically motivated and has been serving time in a penal colony in the town of Pokrov about 100 kilometres (60 miles) east of Moscow.

His health has been failing since he launched a hunger strike three weeks ago.

“We are extremely concerned that the current danger to Navalny’s life, his most recent incarceration and the past attacks on him, including an attempt against his life last August with the nerve agent Novichok… are all part of a deliberate pattern of retaliation against him for his criticism of the Russian government and a gross violation of his human rights,” the UN experts said.

Pointing to previous rulings by the European Court of Human Rights, the experts stressed that “there is no valid legal basis for Navalny’s arrest, trial and imprisonment in Pokrov.”