Alexei Pichugin’s case in the U.S. State Department report

March 31, 2021

The Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor of the U.S. Department of State has released the 2020 Country Report on Human Rights Practices in Russia. The report cites data from the international human rights center Memorial, which maintains a list of political prisoners. According to the report, the average length of sentences for the cases on their list continued to increase, from 5.3 years for political prisoners and 6.6 years for religious prisoners in 2016 to 6.8 and 9.1 years in 2018. Separately, the report notes that sentences were significantly longer in some cases, such as the case of Aleksey Pichugin, a former security official of the Russian oil company Yukos. Aleksey was imprisoned in 2003. He serves a life sentence for conviction of alleged involvement in the murder and murder attempts; human rights organizations asserted that his detention was politically motivated to obtain false evidence against Yukos executives.

Source: U.S. Department of State