One of the leaders of the pro-Russian Koos party and Estonian citizen Aivo Peterson was sentenced to 14 years in prison for treason by Harju District Court on Thursday.
The trial, which began in November 2023, dealt with allegations of treason against Estonian citizens Peterson and Dmitri Rootsi, as well as claims that Peterson and Russian citizen Andrei Andronov acted to undermine Estonia’s independence.
The charges were connected to meetings with Russian politicians, aligning policy positions, the organization of an independent civil defense organization, and a Russian-funded press trip to occupied Ukraine.
According to the indictment, Peterson and Rootsi, based on instructions received from Russia, knowingly and in an organized manner assisted Russia and people acting on behalf of Russian authorities in non-violent activities directed against the independence, sovereignty and territorial integrity of the Republic of Estonia from October 2022 to March 10, 2023.
…
Here is what the article says:
What were those activities?
Political speech. To create a political party. That would participate in Estonian democratic processes. The political positions of that party are, I think we would agree, very problematic: promoting Russian narratives, pushing the Estonian policy in pro-Russian directions etc. But political positions cannot be crimes in a democracy. And freedom of expression is a fundamental human right. And above all, this is about political speech in the context of a democratic political process, where other political parties would be able to counter it, pitch a better set of ideas to the electorate, and defeat this party at the ballot box. In democracies, you defeat political positions with politics, not with prison sentences.
They didn’t create the organization. They did not do crimes. They were planning to create an organization with goals that frankly with a bit of good faith sound benign (aid people in crises, fulfill defense tasks in case of vacuum). But sure, they were probably not that benign and pro-russian stooges don’t necessarily deserve good faith. But that’s beside the point. Notice this very crucial detail: “The organization would have involved individuals holding firearms licenses.” In other words: the Estonian government could at any point control these people’s access to weapons. The police and security services could keep a hawkish eye on them and throw the book at them with the full force of the law the moment they step outside the law. But convict them for doing something. I mean, there is a LOT of space for the Estonian government to maneuver before rushing to sentencing someone to …14 years in prison for the thought crime of imagining a militia.
That’s it. Those are the two substantive allegations made in the article. The rest are about meeting with Russian politicians in furtherance to these aims. In other words, they are aggravating conditions to these two crimes. So we have two crimes: political speech and imagining a militia. Both of those should not be worth 14 years in prison in a democracy. Sorry, but this is not what justice should look like in an EU country. For comparison: the violent neonazis in Germany of the Revolution Chemnitz group received less than half of that for actual violent crimes. Nazis. In Germany. Violent ones. This guy’s 14 years is wildly disproportionate.
Democratic norms, rule of law, civil rights, freedom of expression and of association, freedom to play the democratic game, these are not jokes, they are not negotiable.