Three lawyers for the late opposition leader Alexei Navalny have been sentenced to years in a Russian penal colony.
Igor Sergunin, Alexei Liptser and Vadim Kobzev were found guilty by a Russian court on Friday of belonging to an extremist group.
The trio were arrested in October 2023 before being added to an official list of “terrorists and extremists”.
They were sentenced respectively to three and a half, five and five and a half years after a trial held behind closed doors in the Vladimir region, east of Moscow.
Yulia Navalnaya, the widow of the late Navalny, a staunch Vladimir Putin critic, said: “Vadim, Alexei and Igor are political prisoners and must be released immediately.”
Human rights activists say the prosecution of lawyers who defend people speaking out against the authorities and the war in Ukraine crosses a new threshold in the repression of dissent under the Russian president.
“Lawyers cannot be persecuted for their work,” rights group OVD-Info said in a statement.
“Pressure on defence lawyers risks destroying the little that remains of the rule of law, whose appearance the Russian authorities are still trying to maintain.”
It said Navalny‘s lawyers were being prosecuted “only because the letter of the law still matters to them and they did not leave the man alone with the repressive machine”.
Navalny, who died suddenly aged 47 in an Arctic penal colony in February last year, was himself convicted of extremism and other charges, all of which he said were manufactured by authorities to silence his criticism of Putin.
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The Kremlin says it does not comment on individual court cases, but authorities have long sought to portray Navalny and his supporters as Western-backed traitors seeking to destabilise Russia.
Despite his imprisonment, Navalny was helped by his lawyers to post on social media and file frequent lawsuits over his treatment in prison, using the resulting legal hearings as an opportunity to continue speaking out against the government and the war.
The lawyers were accused of enabling him to continue to function as the leader of an “extremist group”, even from behind bars, by passing his messages to the outside world.
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In court, a woman shouted “Boys, you are heroes” and supporters applauded the three men, standing together in a barred cage, after their sentencing.
Ms Navalnaya alleges her husband was murdered on Putin’s orders, an accusation that the Kremlin has strongly denied.
She herself is wanted in Russia for alleged extremist activity but has said she hopes to return to the country one day and run for president.
