Amnesty International has stripped the Russian opposition leader and political prisoners Alexei Navalny of his "prisoner of conscience" status after it was revealed that he made xenophobic comments about immigrants 15 years ago, BBC reports.
Navalny was arrested and sentenced to two and a half years in a labour colony earlier this year in what observers have described as a political prosecution.
The organization made its decision after old videos of the opposition leader resurfaced, including one where he refers to immigrants as "cockroaches." As Amnesty International considers such utterances to be "hate speech," they are "no longer able to consider Alexei Navalny a prisoner of conscience."
"He cannot be a prisoner of conscience: that is someone who never advocates hate or violence or uses hate speech," said Amnesty International's Alexander Artemev. Artemev justified his position by noting that Amnesty delisted Nelson Mandela, who played a key role in liberating South Africa from apartheid, as a "prisoner of conscience" in the 1960s.
Navalny has not repeated such statements in recent years.
Supporters of Navalny believe that Amnesty's decision came as a result of a coordinated pressure campaign by the Kremlin. Many of the calls to delist Navalny as a prisoner of conscience quoted Katya Kazbek, a pseudonym of a writer for the pro-Kremlin propaganda outlet RT. While claiming to be a "feminist, LGBT researcher, citizen of the world," Kazbek has made posts praising Joseph Stalin and denouncing Navalny as a puppet of the US government.
Alexander Plyushev, a Russian breakfast show host, described the delisting of Navalny as "a huge victory for Russian state propaganda." The move has been praised by RT as well.
The organization says it will still continue to push for Navalny's release.
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