[JURIST] Alexei Navalny, a well-known Russian opposition leader, was arrested on Sunday at a demonstration protesting the alleged corruption of Russian Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev [official website]. On Monday, the Tverskoy Court fined [BBC report] him 20,000 rubles (USD $350) for organizing the protest and sentenced him to 15 days in jail for resisting police orders. Protests against Medvedev took place in many other Russian cities on Sunday, including St. Petersburg. Police estimate [WSJ report] between 7,000 and 8,000 people attended the Moscow protest. Moscow law enforcement officials reported that 500 individuals had been detained, but the human rights group OVD Info [advocacy site, Russian] estimates twice that number.

This is not the first time Navalny has trouble with the Russian legal system. In February he was convicted and sentenced [JURIST report] for embezzlement. That same month, the European Court of Human Rights ordered [JURIST report] Russia to pay more than €63,000 for arresting Navalny multiple times between March 2012 and February 2014. In May a Moscow court declined [JURIST report] authorities’ request to convert Navalny’s suspended sentence into a prison term. He had been convicted of fraud and sentenced to three-and-a-half-years suspended sentence. In 2015 Navalny was handed [JURIST report] a 15-day prison sentence for distributing leaflets attempting to publicize an “anti-crisis” demonstration. In 2014 Navalny and his brother, Oleg Navalny, were charged [JURIST report] with embezzling approximately 30 million rubles (USD $518,000) from French cosmetics company, Yves Rocher Vostok, and the Multidisciplinary Processing Company by a fraud scheme between 2008 and 2012.