The Supreme Court rejected Navalny’s appeal to ban jargon

The Supreme Court of Russia refused Alexei Navalny’s request to cancel the ban on the use of “words and expressions adopted in the criminal environment” by prisoners – the so-called prison jargon. The report from the court session, in which Navalny participated via video link from the colony, was conducted by “Mediazon”.

Navalny found out about the ban after he was sent to a detention center for using the expression “under the roof”. It turned out that the dictionary of prison jargon used by the FSIN was compiled back in Soviet times, in 1983, and it belongs to the category of literature for official use, and inmates cannot familiarize themselves with it.

According to Navalny, he was threatened to be sent to the SHIZO also for the words “balanda” and “prisoner”, which are widely used, including in the press. As the oppositionist argued, jargon is used by everyone in the colony, including FSIN employees, but only it is ordered. “The life of an educated Russian person includes the use of these words that are commonly used,” Navalny said, citing numerous victims of repression among the Russian intelligentsia as an example.

Navalny also pointed out that words related to prison jargon are used by Vladimir Putin (“thrown”) and the representative of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Maria Zakharova. The court, however, ignored this argument. The representative of the Ministry of Justice insisted in court that the prisoners must communicate politely with each other.

Before the beginning of the meeting, the oppositionist, in a conversation with a lawyer that was broadcast, praised the investigation of his colleagues from the Federal Bureau of Investigation into the yacht used by President Vladimir Putin, and also said that he learned about the alleged poisonings of several Russian female journalists abroad and noted that some of the described the symptoms were very similar to those he himself experienced after poisoning in 2020.

Navalny was recently sentenced in a new criminal case to 19 years in a special regime colony, but for now he continues to be in a strict regime colony in the Vladimir region, where he is serving his previous, 9-year term. He was placed in SHIZO more than 15 times, as he claims, on trumped-up grounds.