Amnesty accused of 'siding with tyrants' for revoking Alexei Navalny’s 'prisoner of conscience' status

Amnesty International has been accused of “siding with tyrants” and buckling to a Kremlin-backed disinformation campaign after it revoked Russian opposition figurehead Alexei Navalny’s status as a prisoner of conscience.

The global human rights organisation said Mr Navalny, who was jailed last week after surviving an assassination attempt apparently orchestrated by the Russian security services, did not deserve the designation because comments he made 15 years ago about immigration.

In a move that drew immediate condemnation from fellow human rights activists and appeared to catch the organisation’s own Russian office by surprise, the group said it had taken an "internal decision to stop referring to Aleksei Navalny as a prisoner of conscience in relation to comments he made in the past".

“Some of these comments, which Navalny has not publicly denounced, reach the threshold of advocacy of hatred, and this is at odds with Amnesty's definition of a prisoner of conscience,” Denis Krivosheev, the deputy director of Amnesty's Europe and Central Asia office, said in a statement.

Mr Krivosheev appeared to be referring to two videos Mr Navalny produced in 2007 when he was entering national politics.

One is an argument for gun rights in which he advocated carrying a pistol for self defence against Islamist terrorists, who he compared to “cockroaches”.

In the second he posed as a dentist to argue that only by deporting immigrants could Russia prevent inter-ethnic conflict and the rise of the far-Right.

He has never retracted the statements. Mr Navalny has also been criticised for attending the Russian March, an annual nationalist rally that drew large crowds in Moscow in the 2000s.

Mr Krivosheev did not explain how the group had been previously unaware of the videos, which are well-known among followers of Russian human rights and current affairs.

Tom Tugendhat, the chairman of Britain's Foreign Affairs Select Committee, said: “If Amnesty will only call out the persecution of saints, they’re siding with tyrants. The prisons will be full and they will stay silent as ordinary, flawed human beings are persecuted for crimes of conscience.”

Fellow human rights activists Russia watchers expressed shock at the move.

“It is not a thoughtful decision," Sergei Davidis, the head of the programme for supporting political prisoners at Memorial, a Russian rights group, told The Telegraph. “Objectively it hurts both Navalny's and Amnesty's reputation.”

Amnesty International recognised Mr Navalny as a prisoner of conscience on the evening of Jan 17, when he was arrested immediately after returning to Russia for the first time since he was poisoned with a nerve agent in August. On Saturday he was jailed by a Moscow court for breaking parole conditions while he was recovering from the attack in Germany.

Alexander Artyemov, Amnesty's media manager in Moscow and spokesperson for Russia and Central Asia, told The Telegraph that the group had come under pressure from a sudden wave of enquiries about the videos that appeared to be a “targeted and coordinated campaign to discredit Alexei Navalny abroad and to torpedo Amnesty International’s efforts to free him”.

"Colleagues from the Russian team had an idea that Navalny held nationalistic views, but it seemed to them that all his subsequent activities and publicly dissociating himself from the most odious things – like participation in the Russian marches – closed the issue,” he told The Telegraph.

Mr Navalny's allies said Amnesty appeared to be the victim of a misinformation campaign and urged it to reverse the decision.

“This is not the first time when a respected and well-meaning international institution has fallen a victim to Russian disinformation," said Vladimir Ashurkov, the executive director of Mr Navalny’s anti-corruption foundation.

"We believe a mistake was made and we will be working with Amnesty International to persuade them to reverse their decision.”

The embarrassment deepened late on Tuesday when Amnesty’s top executive was apparently tricked by a prankster posing as a member of Mr Navalny’s team.

Julie Verhaar, the acting Secretary General of Amnesty International posted a Tweet publicly thanking Leonid Volkov, Mr Navalny’s chief of staff, for a “constructive conversation” about the controversy.

But Mr Volkov replied that he had never spoken to her and suspected she had been called by Vovan, a comedian known for making embarrassing prank calls to foreign critics of the Kremlin.

Ms Verhaar said in a statement later on Tuesday evening: “The speculation around Amnesty International’s use of the term 'prisoner of conscience' is detracting attention from our core demand that Aleksei Navalny be freed immediately.

“The term ‘prisoner of conscience’ is a specific description based on a range of internal criteria established by Amnesty. There should be no confusion: nothing Navalny has said in the past justifies his current detention, which is purely politically motivated".