On Monday 18 March, the spokesperson for the European External Action Service, as well as the chairs of the European Parliament Foreign Affairs Committee, David McAllister, and the Human Rights Subcommittee, Antonio Panzeri, denounced the sentencing earlier in the day of the “prominent human rights defender”, Oyub Titiev, director of the Memorial Human Rights Centre in the Chechen Republic, to four years of imprisonment in a penal colony for “large-scale marijuana possession”.
In two separate statements, the EEAS spokesperson and European Parliament members called for Mr Titiev's immediate release. The spokesperson considered that Mr Titiev had not received a fair trial and that his conviction was directly related to his work at Memorial, “an organization that has been the subject of ongoing intimidation and harassment”.
“This conviction signals that the authorities are cracking down on those working to protect and promote human rights instead of on those committing human rights violations in Chechnya”, said McAllister and Panzeri.
Russia has “freely” pledged to guarantee the “right of everyone, individually or in association with others, to freely seek, receive and impart views and information on human rights and fundamental freedoms”, the EEAS spokesperson recalled. “We expect these commitments to be upheld”, she warned. (Original version in French by Camille-Cerise Gessant)