Illegal profession
What does the imprisonment of Navalny’s lawyers mean for Russia’s criminal justice system?
With the unprecedented conviction on Friday of three lawyers on “extremism” charges for their past work representing the late Russian opposition leader Alexey Navalny, the already atomised Russian legal profession now finds itself entering uncharted territory.
At the time of Navalny’s death in an Arctic prison almost a year ago, his three lawyers, Vadim Kobzev, Alexey Liptser and Igor Sergunin had already been in custody for four months awaiting trial for “involvement with an extremist community”.
Late last year, the prosecutors in the case requested almost the maximum sentence of just under six years for each of the three men, which the court dutifully handed down, although in the case of Segunin, the only one of the three who pleaded guilty to the charges against him, the five-year sentence requested by prosecutors was commuted to three years and six months.
The veracity of the charges against the lawyers does not withstand even the most basic scrutiny, not least as none of the lawyers has ever worked for Navalny’s Anti-Corruption Foundation (FBK), the organisation deemed extremist by the Russian authorities that forms the kernel of the criminal case, or even formally belonged to it.
The ruse of prosecuting the lawyers was done plain and simply to deprive Navalny of an adequate defence team, giving him less of a chance to establish a legal strategy and ultimately breaking his will. When Navalny’s will remained unbroken, he was killed.
During the trial it emerged that the privileged meetings the lawyers had with their client in prison had been secretly filmed by prison staff, a grave violation of their constitutional rights and the rule of law in Russia.
The consequences of the case remain to be seen. But its impact on what’s left of the shattered legal profession in Russia is not hard to predict. Some lawyers have been forced to give up their jobs, while others now think long and hard before taking on sensitive cases. In any case, the number of those willing to represent defendants in political cases is inevitably and unsurprisingly on the decline.
Navalny’s family said recently that surveillance of the lawyers had been going on for years. If the investigators truly believed the lawyers had committed a crime, they should have put a stop to any illegal activity immediately and detained them as they left the detention centre with the documentation they were alleged to have taken from their client. But that didn’t happen.
NGE: Do you think the Russian legal profession as a whole has turned a blind eye to what’s happening to its colleagues?
DD: I was still pleased that quite a few lawyers took it upon themselves to show up on 10 January to hear the defendants’ closing statements, about 20 in all. It showed they were concerned about their three colleagues, first and foremost, but also about the future of the legal profession as a whole. After all, the case has shown that no lawyer can now be 100% sure that they will be afforded the legally guaranteed privacy to meet their client in prison, that their conversations won’t be recorded, and that they won’t themselves end up behind bars on the same charges as their client. So it was 20 very brave individuals who went to the court on 10 January.
NGE: Are there already any discernible consequences from the case?
DD: The main tangible consequence is that lawyers are now much more afraid to defend opposition figures, civil activists and anyone charged with crimes against the state in general. As we see with Liptser, Kobzev and Sergunin, defence lawyers can quickly become defendants themselves.
The main unofficial role of our profession in Russia nowadays is as a point of contact between the client in custody and their relatives and loved ones on the outside.
