Navalny dedicates award to all political prisoners in Russia, Belarus

GENEVA: Jailed Kremlin critic Alexei Navalny has dedicated a prestigious rights award to all political prisoners in Russia and in Belarus, his daughter told a summit of rights defenders on Tuesday.

"My dad asked me today to give this award to every single political prisoner in Russia and Belarus," Daria Navalnaya said in a video statement to the Geneva Summit for Human Rights and Democracy, citing a letter from her father.

"He wrote that most of them are in a much worse situation compared to me, because they're not as well known or famous," the 20-year-old said in her first public comments since her father's jailing in February.

"They should know that they are not alone or forgotten about."

Navalnaya was participating in the annual summit sponsored by over two dozen non-governmental organisations to accept the "Courage Award" on behalf of her father. Navalny is Russian President Vladimir Putin's most outspoken domestic critic.

Navalny was given the prize for his "extraordinary courage and heroic efforts to sound the alarm about the Putin regime's grave violations of the human rights of the Russian people," explained Hillel Neuer, head of the UN Watch NGO, one of the summit's co-organisers. Navalny, who survived a near-fatal poisoning with a Soviet-designed nerve agent last year, was imprisoned for two-and-a-half-years on old embezzlement charges in February.

He accuses the Kremlin of being behind the assassination attempt, which Russian officials have repeatedly denied. The anti-corruption campaigner declared a hunger strike in March to demand proper medical treatment behind bars for a growing list of health complaints, including numbness in his limbs.