Several dozen Russian lawyers have issued a hard-hitting statement in support for jailed Crimean Tatar rights lawyer Emil Kurbedinov and his colleagues who, they stress, are providing the last obstacle to total lawlessness in Russian-occupied Crimea. Kurbedinov has long been aware that the role he is playing both in defending victims of persecution and in highlighting rights violations makes him ‘Enemy No. 1’ for the FSB and therefore in danger.

Kurbedinov is acting for defendants in virtually all of the ever-increasing number of politically motivated prosecutions in Crimea, and was on his way to the home of another victim – Crimean Tatar activist Seiran Saliev – when detained. As the wife of one political prisoner wrote, it is Emil everybody calls in the first instance. By imprisoning him on nonsensical charges linked with a video reposted on a social network in 2013, the FSB have deprived other political prisoners of defence for the next 10 days. There are very real concerns that Russia may be testing the water with an administrative arrest, before trying to remove Kurbedinov altogether through some kind of fabricated criminal charge. Other lawyers defending Crimean prisoners are also at risk, as the effective abduction by the FSB of Russian lawyer Nikolai Polozov a day earlier made clear.

Read more here.