#UN rights chief urges Russia to probe suspected poisoning of Alexei Navalny

Enlarge Image

Alexei Navalny, Russian liberal opposition leader and a head of an anti-corruption foundation works in his office during president elections, Russia in 2018.
EPA

The top UN human rights chief called Tuesday on Moscow to conduct or cooperate with a full independent investigation into Germany’s “unequivocal proof” that Russian dissident Alexei Navalny was poisoned with a Soviet-era nerve agent.

“It is incumbent on the Russian authorities to fully investigate who was responsible for this crime, a very serious crime that was committed on Russian soil,” Michelle Bachelet said in a statement, Agence France-Presse reported.

Navalny, 44, has come out of his induced coma in a Berlin hospital, where he has been treated after being flown to Germany on Aug. 22. He became sick two days earlier on a domestic flight from Siberia to Moscow.

Aides believe Navalny sipped tea at the airport laced with poison, and his family has always pointed the finger at the Kremlin.

German chemical weapons experts said last week that tests proved “without doubt” that he was poisoned with the nerve agent Novichok – though Russia has always denied that the Kremlin was involved in his poisoning.

“The number of cases of poisoning, or other forms of targeted assassination, of current or former Russian citizens, either within Russia itself or on foreign soil, over the past two decades is profoundly disturbing,” Bachelet, the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, said in a statement.

“And the failure in many cases to hold perpetrators accountable and provide justice for the victims or their families, is also deeply regrettable and hard to explain or justify,” she added.

Novichok is the agent British authorities said was used to poison former Russian spy Sergei Skripal and his daughter in England in 2018.

Russia also has rejected any involvement in the Skripal case, as well as in the death of former KGB agent Alexander Litvinenko, who was poisoned with highly radioactive polonium-210 at a hotel in London.

While the UN rights office said it was not in a position to make direct accusations against Moscow, Bachelet said nerve agents and radioactive substances such as Novichok and polonium-210 are very difficult to get hold of.

“This raises numerous questions,” she said. “Why use substances like these? Who is using them? How did they acquire them?”

Bachelet also pointed out that before Navalny’s alleged poisoning, he had been harassed, arrested and assaulted either by authorities or by unknown assailants.

“Navalny was clearly someone who needed state protection, even if he was a political thorn in the side of the government,” she said.

“It is not good enough to simply deny he was poisoned, and deny the need for a thorough, independent, impartial and transparent investigation into this assassination attempt,” Bachelet added.