A Moscow district court on Thursday sentenced veteran human rights activist Lev Ponomaryov to five and a half years in a penal colony in absentia, after finding him guilty of evading Russia’s ‘foreign agent’ labelling requirements and organising the activities of an ‘undesirable’ organisation. The Khoroshevsky District Court also barred the 84-year-old from administering websites for nine years. Prosecutors had requested a term of six years and five months and a ten-year website ban, according to court statements.

Russian judicial authorities said Ponomaryov repeatedly failed to affix the mandatory ‘foreign agent’ disclaimer to his social media posts, despite having been fined twice for the same offence. The second charge stemmed from his creation of the Andrei Sakharov Institute in Paris in November 2022, which the Russian Prosecutor General’s Office later designated as undesirable. According to the prosecution, the institute disseminated materials ‘aimed at fostering protest sentiment and discrediting the state authorities’ of Russia. Ponomaryov’s court-appointed lawyer told the court he had no instructions from his client regarding the charges. The institute itself describes its mission as supporting Russian civil society under repression, assisting political refugees and deserters, and creating a platform for expert discussion on ending the war and building democracy in Russia.

The verdict marks the first criminal conviction for a ‘foreign agent’ labelling violation, moving beyond the administrative fines that have been imposed on dozens of designated individuals and media outlets since the law’s introduction in 2012 and its expansion in 2022. Ponomaryov, a former State Duma deputy and co-founder of the Nobel Peace Prize-winning Memorial society, was designated a foreign agent in 2020. He left Russia in 2022 after being detained for protesting the full-scale invasion of Ukraine and now resides in France. In late 2022, he challenged the foreign agent law before Russia’s Constitutional Court, which declined to hear his complaint, ruling that he had received foreign funding and published his views on human rights in Russia.

The sentence is to be served from the moment of Ponomaryov’s detention on Russian territory or his extradition. He is currently on an international wanted list, though no extradition request has been publicly reported. The verdict can be appealed, but with Ponomaryov in France, enforcement remains contingent on his return or a change in his legal status abroad. The case is the latest in a series of criminal prosecutions under the foreign agent and undesirable organisation laws, which European Union officials and international human rights groups have described as instruments to suppress independent political activity.