Alexey Navalny’s mother has compensation claim for his death in prison thrown out

The mother of late Russian opposition leader Alexey Navalny has been denied a compensation payment for his death in prison in an appeal against an earlier ruling, Russian independent online media outlet RusNews reported on Tuesday. 

Lyudmila Navalnaya, whose son was recently revealed to have been killed using a rare poison derived from a South American tree frog while in an Arctic penal colony in February 2024, was denied compensation by a court of appeal in the city of Saratov, in the Volga region, after an initial claim she made requesting moral damages for her son’s death was thrown out. 

In her initial claim, Navalnaya called for the actions of the penal colony’s medical staff to be recognised as criminal in light of her son’s condition, accusing them of failing to provide him with the necessary medical treatment, which ultimately led to his death. 

Her original claim was rejected in March 2024 by a court in Labytnangi, a town in the Yamalo-Nenets autonomous district, near to Kharp, where Navalny’s penal colony was located. The court ruled that only the deceased could have been the plaintiff in such a case, which close Navalny associate Ivan Zhdanov later described as “mocking wording”.

Tuesday’s ruling upheld the initial decision that there was no connection between the actions of the staff at the penal colony and Navalny’s death, despite the fact that no details from the investigation into his sudden passing had been presented to the court, Navalnaya’s lawyer Vasily Dubkov said, adding that it was “impossible to verify the investigator’s conclusions about the absence of criminal activity”. 

The ruling comes just over a week after Navalnaya, along with other family members, friends, and supporters, marked the second anniversary of the politician’s death by leaving flowers on his grave at Moscow’s Borisovsky Cemetery.