Fragments of a blog
Fragments of a blog
Imagine a nominally federated but largely centralized polity with a Continental legal system. The prosecutor-general heads the federal prosecution service, which is responsible, through regional and local branches, for bringing all the criminal prosecutions and for overseeing all the criminal investigations in the…
Yesterday, the Moscow City Court affirmed the trial court’s verdict and sentences in the case against opposition leader Alexei Navalny and his brother Oleg. Alexei Navalny received a suspended sentence of 3.5 years but Oleg Navalny, who is already in jail, was…
(1) The Russian Investigative Committee’s strongest side is fabricating cases against Alexey Navalny and other opposition activists. I’ve blogged about the investigators’ tricks and drew some international comparisons but this time – as Navalny is facing a 10-year sentence in the new,…
Tetyana Lokot reports for Global Voices: Just one day after supporters of Putin critic and opposition figure Alexey Navalny set up a Facebook event page for a protest rally in his support, the page has been blocked for users in…
Alexei Navalny, the Russian opposition leader, has been under house arrest since February. He is serving a suspended sentence for “embezzlement” and has recently been indicted for “fraud”. His campaign team is being investigated for stealing donations. In other words, the…
Italy’s much-criticized calumny laws can be ruinous: Amanda Knox was convicted of calumny after Perugian cops had asked her to “imagine” being present at the scene of crime with her employer and she had dutifully complied. Although Italy’s supreme court…
Alexey Navalny and Pyotr Ofitserov had their prison terms suspended earlier this week. The trial court in Kirov sentenced them to five and four years initially; the Kirov Oblast court, acting as a court of appeal in this case, ordered the…
The August 2013 trial of Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny and his friend Pyotr Ofitserov was, and the re-trial of Amanda Knox and Raffaele Sollecito, which began on Sept. 30, are likely to be adversely and perversely affected by findings…
As I’ve said before, the fact-finding part of the Navalny trial was not an all-out farce – as the defense cross-examined the prosecution’s witnesses and called its own, it demonstrated that the state lacked a case against Navalny’s and Ofitserov’s.…
So people keep asking, “If Navalny was wrongly convicted of embezzling 16 mln rubles (roughly $500k), where did the money go?” The simple answer is, none ended on Navalny’s accounts because over RUB14 mln went to timber suppliers and the…
Alexey Navalny, the Russian opposition activist famous for his anti-corruption campaigning, is running for the mayor of Moscow in the September 8 election. He is running while appealing a conviction for “embezzlement.” The conviction is preposterous and shows once again that…
I’m reposting a comment from a Guardian discussion thread with minor changes. What are the charges against Navalny? He is accused of using his position as adviser to the Kirov governor back in 2011 for personal gain. Navalny allegedly forced…