On the website of the Federal Chamber of Lawyers, they published the position of its commission on the protection of lawyers' rights regarding the verdict against Alexei Navalny's lawyers Vadim Kobzev* and Alexei Liptsker*, noted by «Mediazona»**.
The politician's defenders were accused of participating in the «extremist» community of the opposition leader and, «using their status», regularly passing letters from the opposition leader from the colony to his associates. The trial was closed, and the verdict was delivered in January: Vadim Kobzev was sentenced to 5 years and 6 months in a colony, Alexei Liptsker — to 5 years.
In his analysis, the chairman of the commission, Henry Reznik, focused on the eavesdropping of Alexei Navalny's meetings with his defenders: «The commission concludes that there were violations of the professional rights of lawyers Kobzev and Liptsker, expressed in the eavesdropping of their meetings alone with the convicted person in the correctional colony».
As stated in the commission's decision, «the absolutization of the state's fight against crime» contradicts Russian legislation. «A legal democratic state solves this problem not «at any cost» — to protect the dignity of the individual, social and moral values of public life, the Constitution of the Russian Federation and federal laws establish complete prohibitions on forcibly seizing information significant for solving crimes, protecting the presumption of innocence, the right not to testify against oneself and one's relatives, the secrecy of confession, providing for criminal liability for torture committed by officials to obtain information or confessions from a person, which in such cases are recognized as inadmissible evidence». Such immunities also include the unconditional prohibition on eavesdropping, as the very possibility of legally eavesdropping on meetings between lawyers and their clients alone undermines the fundamental basis of the legal profession.
As the commission pointed out, apart from the eavesdropping on Alexei Navalny's conversations with his lawyers, no such case is known in the entire history of Russian justice. Moreover, they were absent even during the existence of the Soviet Union. The commission did not comment on the legality of the verdict itself.
Navalny's meetings with lawyers in correctional colony No. 2 in Pokrov were filmed with a hidden camera. Part of the footage reached the opposition leader's associates, and they published the recordings.
* Included in the list of «terrorists and extremists».
** Recognized in Russia as a «foreign agent».