The Diplomat
The Minister of Foreign Affairs, Arancha González Laya, yesterday responded forcefully to the statements of her Russian counterpart, Serguei Lavrov, in which she compared the arrest and conviction of the oppositionist Alexei Navalni with the convictions of the leaders of the Catalan independence process.
“Without entering into comparisons, which are always odious, I would like to remind Minister Lavrov that Spain is one of the 23 full democracies in the world, and there are only 23. Russia is in 124th place out of 167 countries”, the minister declared.
“I would like to remind that in Spain all citizens, everyone, have their rights and freedoms fully guaranteed, and that in Spain there are no political prisoners, there are imprisoned politicians“, she continued. “I hope that Alexei Navalni will have the opportunity to participate and campaign in the next Russian elections as the Catalan pro-independence leaders serving sentences in Spain are doing”, she concluded.
Gonzalez Laya thus responded to statements made yesterday by Sergei Lavrov in Moscow during a joint press conference with the EU High Representative for Foreign and Security Policy, Josep Borrell, who is in Russia on the occasion of the first visit in four years of a head of European diplomacy.
“Of course we have talked about Navalni’s case and about the people detained at the demonstrations”, Borrell told the media. During the previous meeting between the two, he assured, the former Spanish minister conveyed to Lavrov the EU’s “deep concern” about the situation of the Russian oppositionist and reiterated the “demand for his release and the start of an impartial investigation into his poisoning” last summer. “The EU respects Russian sovereignty,” but the issues of “political freedom, civil society, rule of law and human rights” are “central” to its relations with Moscow, he warned.
Navalni was sentenced this past Tuesday to 3.5 years in prison for an alleged fraud case, a sentence that includes the ten months he spent under house arrest. Therefore, if his appeal is unsuccessful, the opposition blogger could be sentenced to two years and eight months in prison.
In response to Borrell’s words, Lavrov assured that the EU has shown that “it is not a reliable partner, at least at this stage”, and warned that “the degradation of relations could have negative and very, very unpredictable consequences”.
He also denounced that in the EU and the United States there have been cases of police abuses and “politically motivated judicial decisions”. That is the case, he said, of “the Catalan pro-independence leaders” who “are in prison for organizing a referendum, a decision that the Spanish justice system has not overturned despite the fact that courts in Germany and Belgium have ruled against it”, he declared, in a personal interpretation of the judicial rulings in these countries regarding the extradition of some of the accused. “Spain has defended its judicial system and has asked that its decisions not be doubted, and that is what we want from the West, in reciprocity”.
