After spending decades defending opponents of the regime and the war in Ukraine in court, the lawyer has herself been imprisoned for a year. At 65, prosecuted for treason, she faces a sentence of twenty years in prison. She wrote to “Le Monde” about her place of detention.
In prison for almost a year, Maria Bontsler, one of the best-known figures among the thousands of political detainees in Russia today, remembered this cruel joke which, dating from Soviet times, did not has lost none of its veracity: One day, from his cell, the accused began to shout: “Where is my lawyer?” He replies: “I’m here, in the next cell…””
Behind the sarcasm, Maria Bontsler, 65, veteran of the defense of human rights in Russia, does not hide her concern: “This is not a joke, but a sad reality. “ Under Stalinist terror as in Vladimir Putin’s Russia.
Lawyer, critical voice against the head of the Kremlin, Maria Bontsler has herself been in prison since her arrest on May 28, 2025. In Kaliningrad, the Russian enclave on the Baltic Sea between Poland and Lithuania, where she lived and worked, the human rights activist, with thirty years of experience, finds herself accused of treason. The lawyer faces up to twenty years in a prison camp.
