Russia’s Navalny To Speak At European Court

Russian opposition politician Aleksei Navalny is expected to speak at a hearing at the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) on January 24.

Navalny wrote on Instagram on January 23 that he was preparing for the hearing at the court in Strasbourg, France, and discussing his remarks with his lawyers.

The hearing was to focus on Navalny’s complaints against the Russian state over several incidents in which he was arrested while attempting to take part in demonstrations.

Both Navalny and Russia have appealed a February 2017 ruling in which the ECHR said that Russian authorities violated his right to free assembly and unlawfully detained him seven times between 2012 and 2014.

The court, which also found that Navalny was unlawfully placed in pretrial detention twice in that period, ordered Russia to pay him 63,000 euros ($78,000).

Navalny, an anticorruption activist and a prominent leader of antigovernment protests in 2011-12, has been convicted on two sets of financial-crimes charges he says were trumped up by the Kremlin as retribution for his opposition to Russian President Vladimir Putin.

The hearing comes as Navalny is seeking to organize nationwide protests on January 28 in support of his call for a boycott of the March 18 presidential election in which Putin is all but certain to secure a new six-year presidential term.

Navalny is campaigning for the election but has been barred from the ballot by the Central Election Commission, which says one of his convictions makes him ineligible to run.