This historian, awarded the 2022 Vaclav-Havel Human Rights Prize, was sentenced on Monday for “high treason”, spreading “false information” and illegal work for an “undesirable” organization. Many Western countries have denounced the severity of the sentence.
Repression continues in Russia. Opponent Vladimir Kara-Mourza was sentenced to 25 years in prison by a Moscow court on Monday April 17 for several charges, including that of “high treason”. Handcuffed in the cage reserved for the defendants, dressed in a black T-shirt and a gray jacket, the 41-year-old opponent welcomed the verdict with a smile, before urging his supporters to write to him. in prison. This historian and human rights defender was remanded in custody a year ago.
In April 2022, Vladimir Kara-Mourza said on CNN (interview in English) that the Russian regime was not “not just corrupt, kleptocratic and authoritarian”but that he was also “a regime of murderers”. He was arrested a few hours later, then a criminal investigation for “spreading false information” was opened against him. In question, in particular, a speech delivered a month earlier in front of elected officials from Arizona, in the United States, during an event of the Mcain Institute. As reminded the organismthe opponent to the Kremlin denounced “war crimes” committed by Russian forces in Ukraine, in particular the use of cluster bombs and strikes on “maternities and schools”.
Following a trial behind closed doors, the court also found Vladimir Kara-Mourza guilty of “high treason”, for having criticized the power during public interventions in the West. A first since the charges brought against the Nobel Prize for Literature Alexander Solzhenitsyn in 1974. He was also found guilty of illegal work for a so-called “undesirable” organization, Open Russia, considered as such by the authorities since 2017. One of his lawyers, Maria Eismont, announced that his client was going to appeal.
A former opposition figure in Russia
Vladimir Kara-Mourza, Russian by birth, also has British citizenship, he who moved to the United Kingdom with his mother at the age of 16, in 1997. Journalist for the daily Novye Izvestia, he follows in the footsteps of Russian opponent Boris Nemtsov after having interviewed him. When he made his political debut in 2003, he ran for the Duma on behalf of two parties: the Union of Right Forces and Yabloko. But he failed, with 8% of the vote, far behind the candidate of United Russia, the party of Vladimir Putin. Vladimir Kara-Mourza then moved to the United States to manage the Washington office of the international television channel RTVI.
He advocates in the United States, Europe and Canada for the adoption of sanctions against Russian officials who are guilty of serious human rights violations. Alongside Boris Nemtsov, he played an important role in the adoption of the so-called “Magnitsky” law, passed in 2012 by the American Congress. It allows to put en imposes sanctions against those found responsible for human rights violations, anywhere in the world. The legislation is named after a Russian lawyer who died in pre-trial detention after uncovering a corruption scandal.
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In the aftermath, the Russian Embassy cancels its press accreditation, which leads to its lidismissal of RTVI. Vladimir Kara-Mourza then became an adviser to an institute run by the son of billionaire Mikhail Khodorkovsky, a businessman who spent a decade in prison for his opposition to Vladimir Putin. The oligarch, after his release, entrusted him with the coordination of the Open Russia movement.
Back in Moscow in 2014, Vladimir Kara-Mourza described the annexation of Crimea in particular as a “crime of the regime” Russian. A year later, at the end of February 2015, Boris Nemtsov was assassinated four bullets in the back on the Bolshoi Moskvoretsky Bridge, a stone’s throw from the Kremlin. Vladimir Kara-Mourza loses a close friend, pet peeve of Russian nationalists.
Victim of two poisonings
Three months later, in May 2015, Vladimir Kara-Mourza was himself hospitalized in intensive care. He remains bedridden for a month and a half after falling into a coma. His entourage denounces a poisoning ordered by the Russian authorities, although no criminal investigation has ever been opened. “The doctors told my wife that I had a 5% chance of survival”, explained in May 2022 to BFMTV. Two years later, he was again hospitalized for the same symptoms, and left for the United States during his convalescence. The opponent today suffers from polyneuropathy and neuromuscular pathology, according to his lawyer Vadim Prokhorov, quoted by AFP.
More recently, Vladimir Kara-Mourza piloted a project aimed at supporting young opponents during the last legislative elections. In March 2021, he was also arrested during a forum bringing together opposition figures, alongside some 200 other participants, during an event organized by the United Democrats, a project of Mikhail Khodorkovsky to promote the election of independent deputies in local elections.
“I failed to convince enough”
In recent years, almost all Russian opponents have been sentenced to heavy prison terms or had to flee Russia. Vladimir Kara-Mourza, however, did not wish to leave his country again. “Staying in Russia gives him the right to address his fellow citizens to talk to them about the resistance”explained his wife, Evgenia Kara-Murza, in the columns of L’Expresson the eve of judgment.
SHowever, the conditions of detention took a toll on his health. “His right foot is affected and he has difficulty walking.”she says, adding that her short walks take place in “a small covered courtyard”, without the possibility of seeing the sky. She adds that her husband, to whom the Council of Europe awarded the 2022 Vaclav-Havel Human Rights Prize, has “not allowed to sit on the bed during the day” and has already lost 22 kilos after a year in pretrial detention.
“I subscribe to every word I have spoken and every word that I have been charged with by this court”, he explained, on April 10, during his last statements in court. He had few illusions about his fate. “I know the verdict. I knew it a year ago, when I saw in the rear view mirror people in black uniforms and black masks running after my car”he summed up, according to comments translated by the geopolitical magazine The Great Continent. “I only blame myself for one thing: during my years of political activity, I did not succeed in convincing enough of my compatriots and enough of politicians from democratic countries of the danger that the current Kremlin regime represents for Russia and for the world.”
