Novaya Gazeta demanded that Navalny’s family be provided with recordings from the video recorders of employees of the colony where the politician died

Novaya Gazeta launched a petition on the Change.org website in which it demanded that the family of Alexei Navalny be provided with video recordings from cameras of employees of a special regime colony in the village of Kharp in the Yamalo-Nenets Autonomous Okrug.

The publication demands recordings that “record attempts to provide medical assistance” to Navalny and resuscitation measures carried out by doctors.

The petition is addressed to the head of the Investigative Committee, Alexander Bastrykin, the Minister of Justice of the Russian Federation, Konstantin Chuichenko, and the director of the Federal Penitentiary Service (FSIN), Arkady Gostev.

At the time of publication of the news, Novaya Gazeta’s petition had collected about 1,700 signatures.

Commentary from the “Analysis” department

Video recording is carried out in all places of deprivation of liberty. Since Alexei Navalny was serving his sentence in a maximum security colony, special regime, surveillance should have been carried out there around the clock, and cameras should have been installed everywhere. Demanding to provide a video recording is a standard lawyer’s tactic, lawyer Valeria Vetoshkina tells Meduza. However, there are serious doubts that the authorities will agree to publish them.

Firstly, the refusal can be explained by security reasons, says Eva Levenberg, coordinator for criminal cases of the OVD-Info project. Secondly, the expert continues, not a single regulatory document, unfortunately, obliges the Federal Penitentiary Service to fulfill such a requirement - and in practice this happens extremely rarely. At the same time, Levenberg emphasizes that such a publication would be in the public interest - and calls on the FSIN to provide evidence of medical assistance to Navalny.

• Alexei Navalny was transferred to special regime colony No. 3 “Polar Wolf”, located in the village of Kharp in the Yamalo-Nenets Autonomous Okrug, at the end of December 2023. Before this, the politician served his sentence in a maximum security colony in the village of Melekhovo in the Vladimir region. In August 2023, the Moscow City Court sentenced Navalny to 19 years in prison in a special regime colony in a case of “extremism.” This verdict became the basis for transferring the politician to another correctional facility.
• On February 16, 2024, the Federal Penitentiary Service reported that Navalny died in a colony. The propaganda television channel RT named the cause of death of the politician as a detached blood clot, citing an anonymous source.