The Council of Europe’s Committee of Ministers last called for the immediate release of Alexei Navalny in December.
In their letter, the ambassadors urged the Russian authorities to comply with the decisions of the European Court of Human Rights, which called for his release in February 2021, following an urgency procedure launched a month after his last arrest, because of “the nature and extent of risk to the Applicant’s life”.
This call has been reiterated time and again by the statutory bodies of the Council of Europe and by the Commissioner for Human Rights. In vain.
Between 2014 - the date of the annexation of Crimea and the placing of Russia under sanctions by the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe - a lasting crisis developed between Moscow and the Strasbourg-based organisation.
This took concrete form in 2015 with a decision by the Duma to place the Russian Constitutional Court above the European Court of Human Rights.
It culminated in Russia’s expulsion from the Organisation in March 2022 following its invasion of Ukraine, a decision which - legally speaking - does not exempt Moscow from complying with the Strasbourg Court’s rulings in any case involving events up to September of the same year.
Alexei Navalny, for his part, had turned to the Strasbourg judges a dozen times since 2017.
That year, Russia was found guilty of “arbitrary arrest and detention”, and the Court once again upheld the applicant’s complaints in 2018, when he asked for the judgement to explicitly mention that his detention “had been politically motivated”.
The most recent “Navalny case” decided by the European Court of Human Rights dates back to last June and resulted in Russia being condemned for failing to carry out an effective investigation into the poisoning of the opposition leader, which was described as “attempted murder”. (Original version in French by Véronique Leblanc)