Wtf? The BBC reports:

Amnesty International has stripped the Russian opposition politician Alexei Navalny of his “prisoner of conscience” status after it says it was “bombarded” with complaints highlighting xenophobic comments that he has made in the past and not renounced.

A spokesman for the human rights organisation in Moscow told the BBC that he believed the wave of requests to “de-list” Navalny was part of an “orchestrated campaign” to discredit Vladimir Putin’s most vocal critic and “impede” Amnesty’s calls for his release from custody.

But on review, Amnesty International concluded that comments made by Navalny some 15 years ago, including a video which appears to compare immigrants to cockroaches, amounted to “hate speech” which was incompatible with the label “prisoner of conscience”.

So that whole being poisoned almost to death by Putin thing doesn’t count any more?

“We had too many requests; we couldn’t ignore them,” spokesman Alexander Artemev told the BBC, explaining that the team initially discounted Navalny’s previous statements – which he has not repeated – as “not relevant” in the light of his current, political persecution.

Amnesty’s offices worldwide, including that of the secretary general, were then hit with complaints from “so-called concerned citizens”, Mr Artemev says, in an apparently co-ordinated move.

Some of the calls to revoke Navalny’s prisoner of conscience status quoted a Twitter thread by Katya Kazbek, a freelance columnist published by the pro-Kremlin channel RT amongst others. She reposted Navalny’s controversial videos after his arrest in January, describing him as an “avowed racist” and accusing supporters of “whitewashing” his nationalism.

That seems like quite a good reason to ignore the complaints, rather than to act on them and say you couldn’t ignore them.