Amnesty International To Inquire Into Repeal Of Navalny's Prisoner Of Conscience Status

MOSCOW (Pakistan Point News / Sputnik - 27th February, 2021) Amnesty International will carry out an internal investigation into the decision making behind the conferment and subsequent revocation of Alexey Navalny's prisoner of conscience status, Secretary General Julie Verhaar said.

Earlier this week, the human rights group announced that Navalny could no longer be referred to as a prisoner of conscience after revisiting some of his comments dating back to the mid-2000s that, it said, might have incited violence, hostility, or discrimination. The organization also lamented accusations of caving to pressure of outside powers, in particular, the Kremlin.

"We will be launching an internal investigation into what went wrong and how we ended up in the situation we're in now," Verhaar said on Twitter.

The internal review will examine the "decision making over the designation of Navalny as a Prisoner of Conscience and the subsequent internal decision to stop referring to him as such," the statement read.

Verhaar also noted that the organizations' "procedures and systems" were at fault for the leak of internal decision-making details into media, specifically the Russia Today (RT) news agency, allegedly making the group the target of the Russian government. No evidence supporting any of these claims was provided in her statement, however.

Canadian-US journalist Aaron Mate, not the Russian media, was the first to report on Amnesty International's revocation of Navalny's status earlier this week. In response to Verhaar's tweet, Mate said that "instead of grappling with the fact that they lionized an unrepentant xenophobe, Navalny stans have decided that it's all some secret RT plot."

The Times newspaper, in turn, suggested that Amnesty International headquarters in London made the Navalny decision unilaterally without consulting the Moscow office allegedly on the request of people linked to RT.

Last month, Navalny returned to Moscow from Berlin after receiving medical treatment for an alleged poisoning. The activist was arrested and referred to a court, which in early February rescinded his suspended sentence in the 2014 Yves Rocher fraud case over multiple probation breaches and replaced it with a 3.5-year term behind bars.