GENEVA—The death of Alexei Navalny is just the tip of the iceberg of Moscow’s repression against any opposition or dissent, the United Nations’ expert on rights in Russia said.
Navalny, the Kremlin’s most prominent critic, died on Friday in an Arctic prison, Russian officials said, a month before an election poised to extend President Vladimir Putin’s grip on power.
“It was expected on some level and it was shocking on another level,” Mariana Katzarova, the UN special rapporteur on the situation of human rights in Russia, told AFP.
She called for an independent investigation into the circumstances of Navalny’s death, including an independent autopsy, separate from the Russian state.
“The human rights situation in Russia has been eroding in the past 20 years but since the full-scale invasion of Ukraine two years ago, it has become a full-fledged repression,” the Bulgarian rights expert said.
“The death of Navalny is just the tip of the iceberg,” she added.
“It’s a metaphor almost for the attack, not only on the neighboring people on Ukraine: an attack against its own people, an attack against Russian civil society and everybody who dares to oppose the policies of the government.”
Katzarova monitors the rights situation in Russia, makes recommendations and reports to the UN Human Rights Council in Genevaand the UN General Assembly in New York.
Although UN special rapporteurs are mandated by the Human Rights Council on particular topics, they do not speak for the United Nations itself.
“We mourn the death of Navalny but we call for the release of the hundreds of political prisoners in Russia—human rights defenders, journalists, lawyers—because I cannot stop thinking, who will be next?”
Katzarova was joined Friday by seven other special rapporteurs to demand justice for Navalny and other political activists “who have fallen victim to the system of repression and silencing of civil society and any dissent in Russia.”