Imprisoned Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny asked a court on Monday to stop the hourly night-time checks he has been subjected to in his penal colony.
Navalny alleged that he has done nothing to warrant the authorities’ decision to identify him as a flight risk, which has resulted in checks, speaking to the court via video link from prison.
“I just want them to stop coming to me and waking me up at night-time,” he told the judge in remarks that were broadcast by the independent Dozhd TV. “What did I do: Did I climb the fence? Did I dig up an underpass? Or was I wringing a pistol from someone? Just explain why they named me a flight risk!”
He claimed that the hourly night-time checks amounted to “effective torture,” telling the judge that if he were forced to such regular wake-ups, he would “go insane in a week.”
Navalny, Putin’s most ardent political critic, was apprehended in January after returning from Germany, where he had spent five months recovering from a nerve agent poisoning he blames on the Kremlin – claims that Russian officials deny.
In February, he was handed a 2 1/2-year sentence for violating terms of a suspended sentence stemming from a 2014 embezzlement conviction, which he says was politically motivated.
He went on a 24-day hunger strike in prison to protest the lack of medical treatment for severe back pain and numbness in his legs, ending it last month after getting the medical attention he demanded.
While he still was on hunger strike, Navalny was moved from a penal colony east of Moscow where he was serving his sentence to the hospital ward of another prison in Vladimir, a city 180 kilometers (110 miles) east of the capital. He still remains at that prison, where he said the night-time checks continued, although they were less intrusive.
With Navalny in prison, prosecutors have asked a Moscow court to designate his Foundation for Fighting Corruption and his network of regional offices as extremist groups. A bill, which has sailed quickly through the Kremlin-controlled lower house of Russian parliament, bars members, donors and supporters of extremist groups from seeking public office.
The parallel moves have been widely seen as an attempt to keep any of Navalny’s associates from running in September’s parliamentary election.
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