MOSCOW, February 2./TASS/. Some diplomats from foreign embassies in Moscow arrived incognito to attend a court session reviewing the case of blogger Alexey Navalny in the Russian capital, Foreign Ministry Spokeswoman Maria Zakharova told Komsomolskaya Pravda radio on Tuesday.
"Interesting things were happening there, you know. Many [diplomats] arrived in diplomatic cars, cars with diplomatic license plates, while many arrived on their own, so to say. Incognito. Yes, this was also the case," the Russian diplomat said.
Maria Zakharova noted that the presence of foreign diplomats at the court hearing reviewing the Navalny case was not a common practice. "Unprecedentedly some so-called experts say that this is a norm. But of course, this is not a norm whatsoever," she said. "The rule for a foreign diplomat is to request a possibility and permission to visit the court, since every country has its own procedures, and attend the cases that concern the fate of a national of the country they represent," she explained.
According to Zakharova, foreign counterparts are now trying to "literally justify their presence" in the Moscow City Court by saying that this is a common practice.
A TASS correspondent reported earlier in the day that about 20 foreign diplomats, including those from the United States, Bulgaria, Poland, Latvia, Austria, and Switzerland, had arrived to attend the Moscow City Court’s hearing on possibly replacing Navalny’s suspended sentence over the Yves Rocher case with an actual prison term.
Diplomats from the American Embassy in Moscow were not attending the court session, embassy sources told TASS later on Tuesday.
"Our diplomats are not attending it in person due to measures of precaution over COVID-19," the source said. The embassy noted that the US side had requested permission to watch the hearing remotely, but did not receive a response. "We are closely following media reports on the court hearing," the embassy said.
Foreign envoys attending court hearings concerning Russian citizens in Moscow is a rare exception, not a common practice, Moscow City Court spokeswoman Ulyana Solopova told TASS on Tuesday. The presence of such a big number of representatives from foreign embassies at a court hearing reviewing the case of a Russian national "happens for the first time in the practice of the Moscow City Court, and district courts too," she said.