The petition to rename The Hague street where the Russian embassy is located after the dead opposition leader Alexei Navalny is heading for its 100,000th signature, with one week to go.

Navalny died on February 16 at the penal colony in northern Siberia to which he had been transferred in 2021. He had been sentenced earlier to over 30 years for fraud and extremism.

“Reaching 100,000 signatures would make the urgency we feel here even more visible,” petition organiser Lissa Hollmann told Dutch News.

The street where the Russian embassy is located is currently named after 16th century VOC official Andries Bicker who made his money trading in furs from Russia.

A name change would “send a signal to the Kremlin and politicians in Russia that his influence does not stop with his death,” organiser of the petition Lissa Hollmann says.

She will hand over the petition to the council on April 4. “We will include a number of possible counter arguments,” she said. “For example, there are relatively few addresses in the street and the Andries Bickerweg is in two parts. So we could ask just to change the section where the Russian embassy is located.”

The council has received various requests to rename the street but it normally takes at least 10 years after the death of a person before a street can be named after them and the process has to be gone through carefully, council spokeswoman Vicky Hendriks said earlier.

Renaming a street has far-reaching administrative and financial consequences and those will have to be taken into account, she said.

A possible precedent for a quicker name change is that of the Amstellaan in Amsterdam Zuid. It was changed to Stalinlaan after World War II but when the Russians invaded Hungary in 1956, locals rebelled against the name and it was changed into Vrijheidslaan (Freedom avenue) in November that year.