CALLOUS DISREGARD FOR HUMAN RIGHTS – by Joe Van Langenberg

With the arrest and subsequent jailing of Russia’s charismatic Opposition leader 41-year-old Vladimir Kara Murza, another nail has been deeply and inextricably driven into the coffin of sacrosanct democratic values.

Kara Murza’s incarceration is tantamount to a callous, vindictive disregard for human rights

According to his wife Evgenia (pictured alongside her husband), Vladimir Kara Murza had been initially arrested for 15 days and jailed, but the charges, which some political observers perceive to have been of a trumped-up nature, were swiftly upgraded to treason; in light of denouncing the war in Ukraine and allegedly denigrating the army.

Kara Murza has never shied away from the fact, that he has always been one of President Putin’s most trenchant critics. And that needless to say, hasn’t sat well with Putin, whose authoritarian style of governance and unorthodox methodology, have incurred the wrath of many world leaders, who respect the sanctity of human rights and all they stand for.

In a no-holds-barred CNN interview hours before his arrest and consequent incarceration of 25 years, Kara Murza pointed out that Russia was being run by a “Regime of murderers and kleptocrats”, a claim endorsed by his wife Evgenia, in an equally candid interview with Canada’s CTV News Channel; in which she drew attention to her husband’s failing health.

Kara Murza has been a political activist, journalist, author and film maker. Nonetheless, he has now been lamentably reduced to a political prisoner, for the ‘crime’ of upholding his democratic ideals and exposing the alleged gross misdeeds of a questionable administration, which according to reliable sources, is slowly but surely, becoming more isolated and marginalised by the day.

Since assuming the mantle of leadership, handed to Putin by former maverick President Boris Yeltsin around 20 years ago, a position which was initially offered to Boris Nemtsov (the then Opposition leader) but who declined to accept, due to irreconcilable differences with Putin, the autocratic strongman has been ruling the nation with an iron hand, stifling media freedom and crushing dissent in any way, shape or form. It was his way, or no way!

Many of Putin’s critics brave enough to confront or question his methods, were either silenced, thrown into the slammer, or worse

In the wake of Nemtsov’s savage and brutal murder on February 28.2015, while passing Red Square and swirling domes of St. Basil’s Cathedral, adjoining the Kremlin; many political analysts reckoned that the much loved Opposition leader’s tragic death, would trigger Putin’s political Waterloo. But, it wasn’t to be.

According to his wife Evgenia, her husband Kara Murza, suffers from a severe nerve disorder called polyneuropathy which leaves him with restricted feeling in both his hands and feet, as a result of been poisoned by security forces in 2015 and 2017, on the supposed say-so of the Kremlin hierarchy.

Predictably, the Kremlin has denied the claim.

Despite falling into a coma, he bounced back.

An understandably emotional and grief stricken Evgenia in the course of her interview with Canada’s CTV News, expressed the view, that the condition her husband suffers from, could possibly lead to partial or even total paralysis, if remained unchecked for too long.

Vladimir Kara Murza is in possession of a Russian and British passport. But more importantly, he’s a father with three children and a wife, who worship the very ground he walks on. And that is something that President Vladimir Putin needs to seriously think about.

Hopefully, Vladimir Putin will have a change of heart and free Kara Murza from the shackles of this draconian and disproportionate sentence.