A petition to rename the The Hague street where the Russian embassy is situated Alexei Nalvalnyweg has been signed over 65,000 times as “as a sign to the Kremlin his influence will not stop with his death”.

Navalny died a week ago in circumstances that have yet to be revealed at the penal colony in northern Siberia to which he had been transferred in 2021. The leader of the opposition and Putin critic had been sentenced earlier to over 30 years for fraud and extremism.

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

Local party Hart voor Den Haag had asked the council to name the street after Navalny in 2022, when he returned to Russia after having survived a poison attack allegedly engineered by the KGB.

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 told RTL Nieuws.

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.

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.

Lissa hopes the same will happen in the case of Navalny. “I’m going to present my petition to the council soon and I hope more people will have signed it,” she said.

Spokeswoman Hendriks said it is not yet clear if and when the matter will come up for debate in the The Hague council.