Amnesty International restores Alexei Navalny’s prisoner of conscience status

• Human rights group apologizes to Russian opposition leader
• Navalny's past nationalist statements had been at issue

Amnesty International has apologized to the jailed Kremlin critic Alexei Navalny for stripping him of its prisoner of conscience" status and said it would restore the designation.

Amnesty announced on 24 February that it would stop referring to Russia's most prominent opposition activist as a prisoner of conscience on the grounds that in the past he had made comments that qualified as advocacy of hatred.