Navalny, Alexei
Anatolyevich,
1976–, Russian lawyer and political activist. Navalny joined the
Russian United Democratic party in 2000 but was expelled in 2007 for his
support of ultranationalist activities. A strident opponent of Vladimir
Putin, he has
campaigned against corruption in government, mainly through organized
protests and the social media. In July, 2013, Navalny was convicted on
embezzlement charges, which he denied; many observers regarded the charges
and trial as part of crackdown on the opposition. He ran (2013)
unsuccessfully for mayor of Moscow while appealing his conviction, and
accused the government of vote fraud. His prison sentence was suspended on
appeal; he was subsequently convicted (2014) on additional embezzlement
charges and given a suspended sentence. In 2016 the European Court of Human
Rights (ECHR) ruled that Navalny had been deprived of his right to a fair
trial in his 2013 conviction. Russia's supreme court then struck down the
sentence and sent the case back to a lower court, which again convicted him,
with a fine and suspended sentence, in 2017. The ECHR later (2017) also
ruled that he had been unfairly convicted in 2014 as well, but the Russian
supreme court then upheld (2018) the original verdict. Navalny, who also has
been convicted several times of staging unauthorized rallies and subjected
to recurring arrests, sought to organize widespread anticorruption protests
several times in 2017; those in March were the largest antigoverment
demonstrations in Russia since those following the Dec. 2011 elections. In
2017 he was barred from running for public office in Russia until 2028
because of his criminal convictions. In 2020 he was hospitalized and then
treated abroad as a result of poisoning with a nerve agent, presumably on
Russian orders; he was arrested when he returned to Russia in 2021 and
sentenced to over two and a half years in a penal colony; he began a hunger
strike in March 2021 to protest the government's failure to provide him with
adequate healthcare. He was awarded the European Union's Sakharov Prize for
Freedom of Thought in October 2021.
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