I’m writing from the Tverskoy District Court in Moscow (today’s hearing is about May 5), but I have good news. Though it’s connected not to the Tverskoy Court, but to the European one.
Information has just been published that we have won yet another case against Putin’s officials. And this case concerns not only me, but tens of thousands of other people as well.
You know that from 2012 to 2017 I was denied an international passport and was effectively barred from leaving the country.
This was done completely unlawfully, under the pretext that “Navalny has a suspended sentence.” For some reason, even lawyers quite often repeat the nonsense that “people with suspended sentences are forbidden from traveling abroad.”
That is not true at all. The law says that a suspended sentence may be one of the grounds for restricting travel abroad. In other words, such people can travel, but some authority may (theoretically) step in and say that, in this particular person’s case, there are special reasons why the suspended sentence should lead to a travel restriction.
In practice, it works differently: the Federal Migration Service simply bluntly refuses to issue international passports to anyone with a suspended sentence. If you already have a passport, you can leave without any problem. If you have money to pay a bribe for a passport, that can be arranged too. Corruption is the main element here—just another inexplicable ban that you have to pay to get around. To “fix the issue.”
I was issued a passport a year ago—on medical grounds, after the attack organized by the Kremlin itself. Apparently, they realized they had gone too far. But that did not change the substance of the case. For many years I was denied a passport, and that was illegal. Back in 2015, I began fighting in court for my right to a passport, and now I have taken the case all the way to the ECHR (European Court of Human Rights) and won.
The court found this practice unlawful and ruled that my rights had been violated. They awarded compensation of €2,000 (I had asked for more).
My thanks to my lawyers, Olga Mikhailova and Vadim Kobzev, for their excellent work.
I hope this ruling will help a huge number of people subjected to this stupid, senseless, corrupt ban.