There has been no trace of Navalny for 13 days – despite requests to 200 prisons, 31 cartoons summarizing a crazy week

Kremlin opponent Alexei Navalny, who has been missing in custody for almost two weeks, again failed to appear at a court hearing on Monday.

The judge in the Vladimir region therefore halted the proceedings until there was clarity about the politician’s whereabouts, Navalny’s team said. Opposition lawyers criticized the court for violating Russian laws. “The judge simply abdicated the duty to administer justice instead of ensuring that the plaintiff appears,” Navalny’s lawyers said.

The UN Human Rights Council’s special representative for the situation in Russia, Bulgarian Mariana Katzarova, expressed her concerns in Geneva on Monday. She said the risk of human rights abuses is particularly high when prisoners are transferred to other prisons. She demanded the immediate release of Navalny and others arbitrarily detained, as well as reparations for their suffering.

There has been no trace of Navalny since December

Navalny, who was sentenced to 19 years in prison for alleged extremism, among other things, repeatedly files lawsuits against the prison system for violating his rights.

There has been no trace of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s fiercest opponent since early December. “Alexei should have had seven court hearings today,” his spokeswoman Kira Yarmysch said on Monday. There is great concern for the 47-year-old as he is in poor health.

Prison staff again simply told the court that Navalny was no longer in the IK-6 prison camp, some 160 miles east of Moscow in the Vladimir region. However, there is no further information regarding his whereabouts. Navalny’s lawyers also accused the prison system of lying, as its staff recently stated that the politician would not be connected to the legal proceedings by video for technical reasons.

Why was Navalny moved?

When the judge asked why Navalny was being transferred from the camp, representatives of the prison system replied: “to serve his sentence.” “This weekend the lawyers conducted research in more than two hundred pre-trial detention centres. We are waiting for answers,” said Navalny’s aide Leonid Volkov.

Kremlin opponents around Navalny also started the ‘Russia without Putin’ campaign in early December, calling on voters to express their protest by voting for other candidates before the presidential elections on March 17. Putin is taking part in the vote for the fifth time and possible competitors are considered hopeless.

Navalny, who also survived an assassination attempt with the nerve agent Novichok in 2020, has been in prison for almost three years. He was internationally recognized as a political prisoner. (sda/dpa)