The project to change the criminal legislation, according to which treason will be punishable by life imprisonment, has been submitted to the State Duma of Russia, the lower house of the Russian parliament, reports the state news agency TASS with reference to the chairman of the parliamentary committee on defense Vasyl Piskaryev. Security and the fight against corruption, writes News.ro.

This commission investigates, in particular, non-governmental organizations, public structures and public associations in “unfriendly countries”.

The State Duma has introduced amendments to the Criminal Code of Russia regarding life imprisonment for treason, Vasyl Piskaryev reported on Friday. “We propose to impose life imprisonment for treason,” he wrote on his Telegram channel.

The deputy emphasized that the amendments to increase the punishment limit also provide for the execution of the punishment in institutions with a special regime of detention, and the right to parole for those sentenced to life imprisonment is not granted earlier after serving the sentence. not less than 25 years, with the condition of exemplary behavior.

“I hope that the amendments proposed by us will be considered by the State Duma in the near future and supported by the deputies. They were prepared for the draft law already adopted in the first reading, which will give an opportunity to quickly consider them,” the deputy said.

Piskaryev also reported that the Duma also introduced amendments to strengthen criminal responsibility for terrorism.

The case of Volodymyr Kara-Murza’s opponent

Opposition politician Volodymyr Kara-Murza is being tried behind closed doors on charges of treason. The 41-year-old is one of the few prominent dissidents who remained in Russia and continued to oppose President Vladimir Putin after the Russian military invaded Ukraine in February 2022.

Kara-Murza was arrested a year ago, accused of spreading false information about the armed forces and declared a “foreign agent,” a term with connotations of espionage that Russian authorities have applied to numerous activists and journalists. His lawyer said in October that he was also being investigated for treason in connection with the three public speeches, a charge that carries a maximum sentence of 20 years under the current criminal code. One of the speeches for which he is charged with treason was delivered before the Arizona House of Representatives, in which Kara-Murza said Putin was bombing Ukrainian homes, hospitals and schools.

On Thursday, the prosecutor’s office asked for 25 years in prison in his case. A few hours earlier, the American news channel CNN released an interview in which Kara-Murza said that Russia was run by a “criminal regime.”

Kara-Murza is also accused of having ties to an “undesirable organization”, namely two opposition groups based abroad.

In a statement released on March 13, he said he would fight all the allegations, saying they were really a “political vendetta.” He gave an example of the practice of Stalin’s NKVD secret police in the 1930s, when Kara-Murza’s grandfather was sent to a concentration camp in the Far East of Russia, Reuters reports.

Volodymyr Kara-Murza (Photo: Robin Utrecht / Shutterstock Editorial / Profimedia)

Kara-Murza holds both British and Russian citizenship and was a pallbearer at the funeral of US Senator John McCain in 2018. He was a close associate of Russian opposition leader Boris Nemtsov, who was shot dead in the center of Moscow in 2015.

Kara-Murza’s lawyer, Maria Eismont, told reporters in a commentary on the SOTA online channel that the process has progressed to the final stage faster than expected. She also said that her client lost more than 17 kg during his imprisonment.

Kara-Murza’s lawyers have previously said he suffers from polyneuropathy, a nerve disease caused by two alleged poisonings that left him in a coma in 2015 and 2017. Russian authorities denied his allegations that the security services were responsible for both incidents.

___

• Follow the latest events of the war in Ukraine LIVETEXT on HotNews.ro