In a crowded and stuffy courtroom on the outskirts of the Chechen capital, a judge on Monday declared a new victory in the war on drugs by sentencing a 61-year-old man to four years of hard labor for illegal possession of marijuana.  

In reality, human rights workers say, authorities delivered the final blow in a bitter campaign by Chechen leader Ramzan Kadyrov to delegitimize and silence government critic Oyub Titiev, the activist who was one of the last people in his homeland brave enough to document abuses of power, extrajudicial killings and torture.

Titiev, the head of Russian rights group Memorial’s Chechen office, says he is innocent of any crime, and says his conviction was based on fabricated evidence.“You don’t need a law degree to see the absurdity of this case,” he said in his closing statement last week.

The tactics against Titiev are part of a longstanding Russian playbook to deploy active disinformation campaigns as well as questionable legal proceedings against government critics, especially human rights workers. In Chechnya, which has suffered through two brutal wars, waves of intimidation by regional authorities against human rights activists and government critics have been particularly terrifying.