OREANDA-NEWS. The European Court of Human Rights has ruled that Russian Federation violated the rights of the opposition leader Alexey Navalny by placing him under house arrest in 2014 during a police investigation of embezzlement.

Navalny’s adherents considered the arrest to be politically motivated. The court in Strasbourg said in its decision that the house arrest order had not been justified and it was “apparent he had been treated in that way in order to curtail his public activities”. The authorities of Russian Federation must pay € 20 thousand as a moral damage compensation and € 2.6 thousand as a recovery of law costs.

“I am sure this ruling will have important consequences for all those in Russia who are constantly subjected to this kind of lawlessness”, Navalny wrote after delivery of a court's decision.

The Kremlin administration did not agree with the decision of Strasbourg Court and called it “unexpected”. “We can hardly agree with it”, said he press secretary of the President of the Russian Federation Dmitry Peskov. “In other respects, we have the Ministry of Justice, and dealing with such an issues is its prerogative”.

This case is not the first time when the European court of human rights has investigated on Russia's treatment of Navalny. In November, it established that seven arrests of Russian opposition leader in 2012–2014 had violated claimant's rights to security, a fair trial and the freedom of assembly. In that case Strasbourg Court ordered Moscow to pay Navalny € 63 thousand. In 2016, the judges found that a 2013 court trial in which Navalny got a five-year jail sentence on corruption charges was unjust. The criminal punishment have prevented the opposition leader from running in elections.