By Mark Trevelyan
LONDON (Reuters) -Three lawyers for the late opposition leader Alexei Navalny were found guilty by a Russian court on Friday of belonging to an extremist group and sentenced to years in a penal colony.
Igor Sergunin, Alexei Liptser and Vadim Kobzev were arrested in October 2023 and added the following month to an official list of "terrorists and extremists".
They were sentenced respectively to 3-1/2, 5 and 5-1/2 years after a trial held behind closed doors in the Vladimir region, east of Moscow.
"Vadim, Alexei and Igor are political prisoners and must be released immediately," Yulia Navalnaya, the widow of the late politician, posted on X.
Human rights activists say the prosecution of lawyers who defend people speaking out against the authorities and the war in Ukraine crosses a new threshold in the repression of dissent under President Vladimir Putin.
"Lawyers cannot be persecuted for their work. Pressure on defence lawyers risks destroying the little that remains of the rule of law, whose appearance the Russian authorities are still trying to maintain," rights group OVD-Info said in a statement.
It said Navalny's lawyers were being prosecuted "only because the letter of the law still matters to them and they did not leave the man alone with the repressive machine".
The United States condemned the sentencing of lawyers "who were simply doing their jobs to ensure a political prisoner was afforded his right to legal representation," the State Department said.
Navalny, who died suddenly aged 47 in an Arctic penal colony in February last year, was himself convicted of extremism and other charges, all of which he said were trumped up by the authorities to silence his criticism of Putin.
The Kremlin says it does not comment on individual court cases. Authorities have long cast Navalny and his supporters as Western-backed traitors seeking to destabilise Russia.
APPLAUSE IN COURT
Despite his imprisonment, Navalny was able via his lawyers to post on social media and file frequent lawsuits over his treatment in prison, using the resulting legal hearings as a chance to keep speaking out against the government and the war.
The lawyers were accused of enabling him to continue to function as the leader of an "extremist group", even from behind bars, by passing his messages to the outside world.
In court, a woman shouted "Boys, you are heroes" and supporters applauded the three men, standing together in a barred cage for the defendants, after their sentencing.
Yulia Navalnaya last month published video of secretly recorded meetings between Navalny and the lawyers in prison, something she said was illegal because an accused person has the right to confer privately with a lawyer. Russia's federal prison service did not reply to a request for comment.
Navalnaya said the recordings were made by the authorities and handed to her team after it offered a reward for people to come forward with information about Navalny's death.
She alleges her husband was murdered on Putin's orders, an accusation that the Kremlin has strongly denied. Navalnaya herself is wanted in Russia for alleged extremist activity but has said she hopes to return to the country one day and run for president.