Amnesty strips Navalny of ‘prisoner of conscience’ status

Prominent rights group steps back from status having reviewed the Kremlin foe’s earlier ‘hateful’ comments.

Amnesty International has stripped Alexey Navalny of the “prisoner of conscience” status it had given him, saying some of the Kremlin critic’s past comments were akin to hate speech. In a statement sent to Al Jazeera on Wednesday, the rights group said it would however continue to “fight for his freedom” – referring to the 44-year-old’s current imprisonment in Moscow. “Amnesty International took an internal decision to stop referring to [Alexey] Navalny as a prisoner of conscience in relation to comments he made in the past. Some of these comments, which Navalny has not publicly denounced, reach the threshold of advocacy of hatred, and this is at odds with Amnesty’s definition of a prisoner of conscience,” the statement said, without specifying what those comments were.