A court in Moscow sentenced opposition activist Vladimir Kara-Murza to 25 years in prison. He was detained in April 2022 and charged with spreading false information about the Russian military in Ukraine. He was later accused of high treason for a series of public speeches against Russian President Vladimir Putin in which he criticized the war in Ukraine and the Russian regime's crackdown on dissidents and critics.
A prisoner of his own conscience
Kara-Murzi has been labeled an "enemy of the people" because he persuaded Western governments to impose sanctions on Russian officials for human rights abuses and corruption.
Kara-Murza's sentence is the longest ever imposed on a political opponent of Vladimir Putin, while the Kremlin ruthlessly suppresses any public speech directed against the regime.
In his closing speech in court last week, Kara-Murza defiantly refused to ask the court to release him and said he stood by everything he said.
"I only blame myself for one thing. I failed to convince enough of my compatriots and politicians in democratic countries of the danger that the current Kremlin regime represents for Russia and for the world," said Kara-Murza, who was declared a "prisoner of conscience" by Amnesty International.
Kara-Murza's sentence, which he compared to Stalin's show trials, was handed down behind closed doors.
Despite everything, he stayed in Russia.
Kara-Murza has both Russian and British citizenship. The British authorities demanded that Kara-Murza be released immediately and added that they would call the Russian ambassador in London, Andrey Kelin, for an interview in order to convey to him that the verdict "contradicts Russia's international obligations to respect human rights."
After the verdict, Kara-Murza's wife Evgenia praised her husband for "courage, consistency and honesty in many years of work."
"I'm so proud of you darling and I'm always here," she tweeted.
Kremlin critic Alexei Navalny, who is also in prison, strongly criticized the verdict, calling it "illegal, unconscionable and simply fascist."
At the time of his arrest last year, Kara-Murza was one of the few prominent opposition figures who decided to stay in Russia.
Hours before he was arrested, Kara-Murza appeared on CNN where he described the Kremlin as a "regime of killers."
Ruthless punishments for dissidents
He fell into a coma in Moscow in 2015 and 2017, after which he claimed that he was poisoned.
Concerns about Kara-Murza's health have grown in recent weeks after he was too ill to attend a hearing last month. His lawyer Vadim Prokhorov wrote on Facebook that he is being treated for polyneuropathy, which is a consequence of poisoning.
Kara-Murza is the second high-profile political opponent of Putin to be jailed since the war in Ukraine broke out. In December, opposition politician Ilya Yashin was sentenced to eight and a half years in prison on similar charges of spreading false information aimed at discrediting the Russian military.
So far, almost 20.000 Russians have been detained for anti-war protests, according to the human rights group OVD-Info.
More than 450 people have been prosecuted for opposing the war in Ukraine, with some facing up to 15 years in prison for crimes such as posting anti-war messages on social media, making the past year the most repressive era in Russia's modern history.
Life imprisonment for treason
On April 18, the lower house of the Russian parliament adopted a law establishing a life sentence for treason.
At the same time, a law was passed, the provisions of which make it possible to punish up to five years in prison for accepting the legal decisions of international organizations of which Russia is not a member.
It is a response to arrest warrant due to the alleged war crimes of Russian President Vladimir Putin issued by the International Criminal Court in The Hague last month, and in connection with the deportation of children from Ukraine to Russia.
Those decisions should be accepted by the Upper House of the Parliament, before Putin signs them. Reuters reports that the previous maximum sentence for treason was 20 years in prison.
ZS/Guardian/FoNet
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