Alexey Navalny’s lawyers file three lawsuits against prison officials

Alexey Navalny’s lawyers have filed three lawsuits against the administration of the prison where he is serving his sentence, the Russian state news agency TASS reported on Monday, April 26, citing the secretariat of the Vladimir region’s Petushinsky District Court. 

The first lawsuit urges the court to deem Navalny’s registration as “liable to escape” illegal. The second challenges the prison administration’s decision to withhold Navalny’s books, including his copy of the Quran. The third lawsuit has to do with the prison’s “illegal censorship” of the newspapers Navalny receives (he has previously complained about articles being cut out of issues of Novaya Gazeta and Kommersant). 

The court has yet to schedule a date for the consideration of these claims.

After he was transferred to Pokrov’s Penal Colony No. 2 in mid-March, Navalny reported being subjected to “torture by insomnia.” Apparently, prison guards wake him up every hour throughout the night for checks, because he is registered as a flight risk. 

On April 13, Navalny announced that he was filing a lawsuit against the prison administration for withholding his copy of the Quran. According to Navalny, all of the books he brought with him to prison, including the Muslim holy book, were taken away under the pretext of checking them for extremist content.

On April 14, Navalny’s associates said that the opposition politician had decided to file yet another lawsuit against the prison administration for cutting an article out of his issue of Novaya Gazeta. The article in question was a column by philologist Gasan Guseynov titled, “In defense of Navalny’s haters.”