2024-03-26 15:58:29
– A call to save Russian dissident Vladimir Kara-Mourza
The wife of the imprisoned Russian opponent of Putin, Vladimir Kara-Mourza, as well as representatives of Memorial are preaching for a prisoner exchange to free the dissident.
OBO with AFP
Published today at 4:58 p.m.
Vladimir Kara-Mourza has twice been invited to Geneva at the Geneva Summit for Human Rights, the last time in 2021.
The wife of Vladimir Kara-Mourza, a Russian opponent who is serving a 25-year prison sentence, said she was in favor of an exchange of political prisoners when their lives were at stake. The entourage of Alexeï Navalny, with whom Vladimir Kara-Mourza was a long-time friend, had affirmed that an agreement with the Russian authorities to exchange him was “in progress and in its final phase”, before his death mid- February in an Arctic penal colony.
Asked regarding the existence of similar discussions concerning Vladimir Kara-Mourza, his wife Evguenia, said she did not know if there were “active negotiations”. “But I know it was a method of freeing some dissidents during the Soviet era. If it was possible in Soviet times during the Cold War, it is certainly possible today,” she said at a press conference organized in Geneva by the Correspondents’ Association. UN.
Heaviest sentence for Russian dissident
Vladimir Kara-Mourza, a Russian-British citizen, was sentenced in April 2023 to 25 years in prison for treason and for spreading “false information” regarding the Russian army, the heaviest sentence imposed on an opponent in the recent history of Russia.
He is in very poor health, according to his supporters, the result of two poisonings he suffered in the past, in 2015 and 2017. He suffers from a nerve disease called polyneuropathy.
“For more than six months now, he has not received any medical treatment and his health is deteriorating,” lamented his wife. “Everything must be done” to save those detained and whose lives “are in danger,” pleaded Evguenia Kara-Mourza.
Fears following the attack in Moscow
“In cases where human lives are at stake, all methods should be used” to save them, she reaffirmed.
A number of Russian opponents have been imprisoned or driven into exile in recent years and repression has increased further since Russia launched its invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.
Evguenia Kara-Mourza as well as representatives of Memorial, the NGO co-winner of the 2022 Nobel Peace Prize and dissolved by Russian justice, said Monday in Geneva that they feared that the human rights situation “continues to deteriorate” in Russia following the bloody attack in a concert hall near Moscow on Friday.
The attack left at least 137 dead, the deadliest attack on European soil claimed by the jihadist group Islamic State (IS).
Labeled terrorists
Violette Fitsner, of the NGO Memorial, said she was “frightened” by the suspects’ allegations of torture. According to Evgenia Kara-Mourza, “this terrorist attack will only worsen the situation, with a greater number of people being labeled as terrorists.”
She also said she was “frightened” following calls from several executives of Vladimir Putin’s regime for the lifting of the moratorium on the death penalty for “terrorists”.
“In today’s Russia, those accused of terrorism are activists or ordinary citizens who, for example, tried to set fire to conscription centers,” she noted.
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