The telegraph
Amnesty accused of ‘allying with tyrants’ for revoking Alexei Navalny’s ‘prisoner of conscience’ status
Amnesty International has been accused of “allying with tyrants” and indulging in a Kremlin-backed disinformation campaign after revoking the status of prisoner of conscience by Russian opposition chief Alexei Navalny. The global human rights organization said Navalny, who was arrested last week after surviving an apparently orchestrated assassination attempt by Russian security services, did not deserve the designation because of comments he made 15 years ago on immigration. In a move that drew immediate condemnation from other human rights activists and seemed to take the organization’s own Russian office by surprise, the group said it had made an “internal decision to stop referring to Aleksei Navalny as a prisoner of conscience in relation to to the comments he made in the past “. “Some of those comments, which Navalny did not publicly denounce, go to the limit of the defense of hatred, and that goes against Amnesty’s definition of prisoner of conscience,” Denis Krivosheev, deputy director of the Amnesty office in Europe and Central Asia, said in a statement. Krivosheev seemed to be referring to two videos produced by Navalny in 2007, when he was entering national politics. One is an arms rights argument in which he defended the possession of a pistol for self-defense against Islamic terrorists, which he compared to “cockroaches”. In the second, he pretended to be a dentist to argue that only by deporting immigrants to Russia could he prevent inter-ethnic conflict and the emergence of the extreme right. He never retracted the statements. Navalny was also criticized for participating in the Russian March, an annual nationalist demonstration that drew large crowds in Moscow in the 2000s. Krivosheev did not explain how the group had previously been unaware of the videos, which are well known among Russian human rights followers and today.