MOSCOW, February 13. /TASS/. Lawyers for Alexey Navalny have appealed to the Committee of Ministers of the Council of Europe over the non-execution of the ruling of the Strasbourg-based European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) on the Yves Rocher case, his lawyer Olga Mikhailova told TASS on Saturday.
"We have submitted a request to the Committee of Ministers of the Council of Europe over the fact that the Russian Federation is not executing the ruling of Strasbourg’s court on the Yves Rocher case. Our appeal will be considered at a hearing in March," she said.
According to Mikhailova, Navalny’s defense will be asking the committee to invoke Article 46 of the Convention for the Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms with regard to Russia.
"This article is applied rather rarely. It stipulates measures against a party that fails to comply with ECHR judgments," the lawyer said.
In October 2017, the ECHR awarded Alexey Navalny and his brother a compensation of 80,000 euro over their complaint, judging that Russia’s authorities had violated several articles of the European Convention on Human Rights in the Yves Rocher case against them. In 2018, following the ECHR ruling, Russia’s Supreme Court resumed proceedings in the Yves Rocher case against the Navalny brothers, but upheld their criminal conviction.
On February 2, Moscow’s Simonovsky Court converted Alexey Navalny’s suspended sentence in the Yves Rocher case into a real prison term at a hearing in the Moscow City Court. Navalny will serve his term in a minimum security penal colony. He will be kept at a pre-trial detention center until the ruling comes into effect.
The ECHR judgement does not contain any conclusions about political underpinning or bias in the criminal case. The compensation was paid off to the Navalny brothers.