Russian-American journalist Masha Gessen has had their visa application delayed by Australia with the Department of Home Affairs reportedly asking for police checks from Russia that were “not possible” to produce.
Gessen, an outspoken critic of Russian president Vladimir Putin, is based in the US and was due to arrive in Australia in recent days to speak at the Festival of Dangerous Ideas in Sydney this coming weekend.
Gessen was charged in Russia for allegedly spreading false information about the military and in July was sentenced in absentia to eight years in prison.
Their Australian visa was delayed after home affairs initially demanded Gessen produce police checks from Russia, festival organisers said.
After being informed that such documents would be impossible to produce, home affairs asked for police checks from the FBI and state police in the US – a jurisdiction in which Gessen has never been charged or convicted of an offence, the organisers said.
Gessen criticised the Australian government for the delay, claiming it had “functionally denied” a visa, aiding in Russian attempts to silence them.
“The Russian government’s persecution of me has one purpose: to make me feel unfree even though I am living in exile and they can’t currently jail me,” the writer said in a statement.
“I am shocked that the first allies the Russians have found in this quest to constrain me are the Australian authorities who have functionally denied me a visa.”
Gessen applied for their visa on 21 June 2024 but home affairs only requested the documents from the US on Friday, the festival organisers said.
To obtain them, Gessen would need to be fingerprinted and would need to attend a face-to-face meeting, a requirement that might be impossible to meet in time.
The Festival of Dangerous Ideas, which is presented by the Ethics Centre, said it did not have an update as of Monday afternoon and was still seeking to secure a visa before Gessen’s events.
The director of the Ethics Centre, Simon Longstaff, said the situation was a “kafkaesque misapplication” of the law. He asked what would have happened had Kremlin critic Alexei Navalny applied for the same visa.
Navalny died in a Russian Arctic penal colony in February.
“Just imagine if Alexei Navalny had lived and one day applied to come to Australia. The whole world knows that his ‘conviction’ was a sham – simply a way for Vladimir Putin to silence a critic. On current form, home affairs would require Navalny to obtain a police certificate from the Russian authorities … or perhaps from those where he might be living in exile,” Longstaff said.
“This is a kafkaesque misapplication of a law that was intended to capture people who have been convicted of real crimes like robbery, murder, and fraud. The Australian courts would never recognise the conviction of Navalny as either safe or valid.
“The same holds for Masha Gessen – who has been convicted of the crime of expressing the views of the Australian government.”
The criminal case against Gessen was launched after they discussed alleged war crimes committed by Russian forces during the invasion of Ukraine in an interview.
They were found guilty of “disseminating knowingly false information about Russian military personnel motivated by political hatred”.
Gessen, a dual US-Russian citizen, lived in Russia until 2013 when the country passed legislation against the LGBTQ+ community. The author of The Man Without a Face: The Unlikely Rise of Vladimir Putin applied for a temporary work visa on their US passport.
The Guardian contacted Australia’s home affairs department for comment as well as the office of the home affairs minister, Tony Burke.
