Imprisoned Russian opponent Alexei Navalny has secured Russia’s conviction by the European Court of Human Rights for “the lack of an effective investigation” into his poisoning in 2020, the ECHR announced on Tuesday. The judges ordered Moscow to pay the dissident 40,000 euros “for moral damages”, the court said in a statement. Russia was excluded from the ECHR in September 2022 following its invasion of Ukraine, but the Court can still be seized for acts involving Moscow committed before that date.
In August 2020, the Russian opponent had been poisoned by a nerve chemical agent from the Novichok group before falling into a coma and had to be placed on life support, the court recalled. The expertise carried out in Russia had concluded that no powerful or toxic substance, no narcotic, no psychotropic substance or any precursor had been found on him or on the objects submitted for analysis.
After his transfer by plane to Germany, the German government had however announced that samples had revealed the undeniable presence of Novichok, a product specifically developed by the former USSR for military purposes. This agent was also used in a 2018 attempted murder of former double agent Sergei Skripal and his daughter in the English town of Salisbury. According to the British authorities, “only the Russian state had the technical means, the experience and the motive” to carry out this operation.