John Lloyd on why Amnesty International should restore Alexei Navalny's Prisoner of Conscience Status

I have previously blogged here on why I think Amnesty's decision to allow itself to be manipulated by Kremlin propaganda to remove "Prisoner of Conscience" status from Russia's best known prisoner of conscience, Alexei Navalny was a dire mistake.

I linked in that blogpost to this excellent critique on The Article by Daniel Johnson of that decision,

An even better piece on the subject by John Lloyd can be found here on the CAPX website.

He argues that Putin has weaponised Western wokery, and if we do not want to allow the Putin regime to weaken democracy in both his country and our own, we need to understand his tactics as well as he knows how to exploit our weaknesses and avoid confronting our strengths.

He argues that those who fight despotic regimes should not have to "pass an exam set by Western liberals" - especially if they are up against people who practice the ultimate forms of "cancel culture" - e.g. lethal ones.

 You don't have to agree with Navalny's statements more than a decade ago about immigrants, which he more recently said he regrets, or with Aung San Suu Kyi's failure to denounce the atrocious treatment of the Rohingya 

(though the subsequent coup against her by those very generals does cast a possible light on why she might not have felt able to) 

to recognise that neither of those people should be in prison, or to avoid paying the international attention which might just deter the tyrannical regimes which have locked them up from deciding to have something worse happen to them.

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