In a statement issued Wednesday, Amnesty said referring to Navalny that it would "continue to fight for his freedom," but that the organization had "taken an internal decision to stop referring to Aleksei Navalny as a prisoner of conscience in relation to comments he made in the past."
"Some of these comments, which Navalny has not publicly denounced, reach the threshold of advocacy of hatred, and this is at odds with Amnesty's definition of a prisoner of conscience," the statement said.
Asked by NPR to provide specifics about the "past comments" the organization referred to, Amnesty declined.
Speaking to NPR's
Weekend Edition in January, Julia Davis, a Russian media and disinformation expert,
said Navalny "still has nationalist leanings" and among other things, supported Russia's 2014 annexation of Crimea, which was widely condemned internationally.
"No one could say that he is in perfect alignment with all of the Western values," Davis told host Scott Simon. "But there again, that's not what he aims to represent. What he mainly represents is the possibility that the Russians might be the ones to decide who gets to lead Russia."