“I would like to remind our esteemed European colleagues that Alexei Navalny has been convicted of fraud. All attempts to present him as a political prisoner and a martyr, as they have already done with the pilot Savchenko and the terrorist film director Sentsov, failed miserably yesterday during the so-called “walks”. The attempts of the Western states to exert pressure on Russia using the institutions of the Council of Europe have also failed. Russia will not implement politicized decisions of the ECHR or PACE, as they contradict Russian law, norms of our Constitution and decisions of the Russian courts. That is another blatant attempt to interfere in Russia’s internal affairs,” said Petr Tolstoy.

He recalled that there were a lot of political prisoners in the Western states and it would be right if the authorities dealt with that issue. “Instead of holding hour-long debates, European humanists should pay attention to their own political prisoners: stop prosecution of Julian Assange, leaders of the Catalan independence movement and the “yellow vests”, Russian-speaking people in the Baltic states. You should admit that there are a lot of issues to deal with,” said the parliamentarian.

Petr Tolstoy recalled that every year thousands of people were imprisoned after they violated the terms of suspended sentence, but PACE did not call for their release. Different political views do not exempt a person from responsibility.

“By adopting politicized resolutions like the recent one on Navalny, PACE ceases to be the “conscience of Europe”, and becomes another puppet using sanctions pressure while the US is pulling the strings,” concluded Petr Tolstoy.

Source: web-page of the State Duma of the Federal Assembly of the Russian Federation