Alexey Navalny files lawsuit against prison for registering him as ‘extremist’

Kremlin critic Alexey Navalny has filed another lawsuit against the administration of the prison where he is being held, the state news agency TASS reported on Wednesday, November 24.

As follows from a case entry on the website of the Vladimir Region’s Petushinsky District Court, Navalny filed the claim application on November 18. Lawyer Vadim Kobzev, who is listed as the plaintiff’s legal representative, has yet to comment on the suit.

The Petushinsky Court told TASS that Navalny is suing to overturn the prison commission’s decision to place him under preventive supervision as “a person professing extremist ideology and prone to commit crimes of a terrorist nature and extremist orientation.”

• This is the fourth lawsuit Navalny has filed against the administration of Penal Colony No. 2 (IK-2), the prison in the city of Pokrov where he is serving out his sentence. In June, the Petushinsky Court dismissed one of these claims, which sought to overturn Navalny’s status as “liable to escape.” Navalny’s flight-risk status was lifted in October, in favor of registering him as an “extremist” — a status that involves fewer checks.
• In June, Navalny dropped his two other lawsuits against IK-2, which concerned the “illegal censorship” of the newspapers he was given and the prison administration’s decision to withhold his books. The opposition politician withdrew the claims because he was given his copies of the Bible and the Quran, and because the prison staff stopped cutting articles out of his newspapers.