Court dismisses Navalny’s lawsuit against prison officials in Vladimir

A court in Vladimir has refused to satisfy Alexey Navalny’s administrative claim against the staff of Correctional Facility No. 3 (IK-3), the state news agency TASS reported on June 10.

The opposition politician was transferred to a prisoners’ hospital on the grounds of IK-3 for treatment in mid-April and was kept there until early June (this came after he went on hunger strike on March 31). Navalny filed a lawsuit against the prison staff for preventing his lawyers, who visited him nearly every day during that period, from bringing cell phones and laptop computers into their meetings. According to a previous ruling from the Russian Supreme Court, lawyers are permitted to bring cell phones and laptops into prison facilities.

Navalny’s lawyer Vadim Kobzev said that the court’s ruling would be appealed. 

On June 2, the Vladimir region’s Petushinsky Court rejected a lawsuit Navalny had filed against Pokrov’s Penal Colony No.2 (the prison where he is serving his sentence), which sought to overturn his status as “liable to escape.” Navalny stated that because he is considered a flight risk, the prison staff wake him up every hour throughout the night as they conduct checks and take videos of him, violating his right to uninterrupted sleep.

On June 7, Navalny dropped two other lawsuits against Penal Colony No.2, concerning the “illegal censorship” of the newspapers he was given and the prison administration’s decision to withhold his books. The opposition politician withdrew the claims because he was given his copies of the Bible and the Quran, and because the prison staff stopped cutting articles out of his newspapers.