Legal Persecution
Mikhail Khodorkovsky was arrested by masked special forces troops armed with machine guns, on the tarmac at Novosibirsk airport, on 25 October 2003. Platon Lebedev had been arrested in his hospital bed months earlier, in July 2003. The circumstances of their arrests proved to foreshadow how the state's machinery of justice would run the proceedings against them.
"Basmanny justice," a reference to the Basmanny District Court of the City of Moscow where Khodorkovsky was taken after his arrest, has now entered the lexicon as a phrase describing Russia's subservient judicial system, where judges are fired for issuing rulings not to the liking of state officials, and where rule of law is largely absent.
The Criminal Allegations
The allegations faced by Khodorkovsky and Lebedev in two separate criminal trials have been described by many independent observers as "impossible". The charges in the second trial even contradicted the Russian Federation's legal defense in international cases involving the Yukos Affair.
2003-2005 Trial
The first guilty verdict against Khodorkovsky and Lebedev in 2005, for which they were sentenced to 8 years in prison, brought international condemnation and has led to a series of appeals to the European Court of Human Rights.
2007-2011 Trial
New charges were brought against Khodorkovsky and Lebedev in February 2007, seeking to prevent their release on parole and to ensure they remained incarcerated when their initial sentences expired in 2011. From that point until the second guilty verdict handed down in December 2010, the second Khodorkovsky-Lebedev trial was marred by human rights abuses and due process violations.
European Court of Human Rights Cases
Information on Khodorkovsky's and Lebedev's appeals to the European Court of Human Rights.
The Prisons
Information on the prisons in which Khodorkovsky and Lebedev have been incarcerated since their arrests in 2003.