JK Rowling and Eric Cantona demand Putin release Alexei Navalny | Abroad

Writer JK Rowling, actor Jude Law, former football player (now actor) Eric Cantona and Nobel Prize winner Svetlana Aleksijevich, among others, write to the Russian head of state that they consider Navalny to be in inhumane conditions.

“He is being held in one of the toughest penal colonies in your country. He is placed in solitary confinement again and again, in a concrete cube the size of a dog house, with no ventilation,” said the celebrities, referring to the solitary cell in which Navalny disappears all the time.

They continue: ‘Visits from relatives and telephone calls to him are prohibited, lawyers are not allowed access to him. Despite the high temperature, he is forced to spend the whole day standing.”

A few days ago, Navalny could be seen and heard again on a TV screen during a court hearing:

The collective, which joins similar requests that Russian doctors and lawyers have previously made to Putin, says Navalny has been convicted of “charges that have never been established by an independent, fair court.” The letter writers also say they support the demand for his immediate release from the German government, the United States and the European Union. “That’s in your hands,” they conclude the letter to Putin.

Colleagues from Navalny’s anti-corruption fund have been sounding the alarm for weeks about the health of Putin’s main critic. He was sentenced to 2.5 years in prison in February 2021, which was later added to another 9 years for embezzlement of millions of euros. No evidence has been provided for this.

According to his close associates, Navalny suffers from back and extreme stomach pains and may be slowly being poisoned. Recently an ambulance even had to arrive. Meanwhile, the prison doctor refuses to say what is causing the stomach pain, a close associate recently told The Guardian.

The Kremlin says it is not monitoring Navalny’s health. “That’s up to the Federal Prison Service,” said spokesman Dmitry Peskov.

The legally permitted maximum period in the isolation cell is fifteen days. Last week, the prison management violated that rule by immediately sending him back to the prison on the day of his release. “A record, although not one I was waiting for,” Navalny wrote sarcastically on Instagram.

The politician is said to have lost no less than eight kilos in the last time of two weeks of solitary confinement, because he does not get enough to eat. He is reportedly unable to access the prison shop to buy food for himself.

On Wednesday, director Ivan Zhdanov of the anti-corruption fund told the AP news agency that Navalny may have to stand trial for involvement in the bomb attack that killed pro-Kremlin vlogger Vladlen Tatarsky in St. Petersburg in early April.

He could get another thirty years for that. Navalny may also soon have to answer to a military court, where he says he could be sentenced to life imprisonment.

Aleksej Navalny became unwell on a domestic flight in 2020 after being poisoned with the Russian nerve toxin novichok. He was transferred from Omsk to a hospital in Berlin, where he recovered. In January 2021, he returned to Moscow. There he was immediately arrested at the airport.