What happens when Navalny’s Anti-Corruption Foundation is declared extremist? Plus the UK’s plan for sanctioning the corrupt
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NAVALNY
I’m going to go out on a limb here and predict that next week a Russian court will ban Alexey Navalny’s Anti-Corruption Foundation as an “extremist organization.” I do not of course mean by this prediction to impugn the honor or integrity of Russian judges (far from it), or to suggest that they would dream of taking political factors into account when returning a verdict (as if), but they do side with the state prosecutors more than 99% of the time, so it seems a safe bet.
We have already had a preview of what this will mean, thanks to a prosecutor winning an injunction on Monday against some of the Foundation’s work in anticipation of the court’s decision.
- "The organization’s extremist activities entail violations of the rights and freedoms of the citizen; harm to individuals, to citizens' health, to the natural environment, to public order, to social security, to society and to the state; and to cause a real danger of such harm being realized,” the prosecutor’s document stated.
Of course, I have no more intention of questioning the integrity of Russian prosecutors than I do of Russian judges (heaven forfend), but it is striking that the man whose signature was at the foot of that document – Denis Popov – was a subject to one of Navalny’s many exposés. In 2019, Navalny accused Popov of having accumulated a property empire in Spain and Montenegro, which certainly appeared to be disproportionate to his income.