Khodorkovsky & Lebedev Communications Center
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On the surface, Russia is starting to look more and more like enlightened Europe, with all of its distinctive political, economic and cultural characteristics. Judge for yourselves. Democracy in Russia appears to exist - the parliament is working, we elect a president; a market economy also seems to be present, and everything is fine with culture too. Thank God, we have brushed ourselves off a bit, run a comb through our hair, and learned some manners.

But appearances, as we know, can be deceiving. Having adopted the standards of European life, having transplanted the institutions of democracy and free markets created by the Old World onto Russian soil, we have nevertheless remained the same wild and unruly Asiatic state we were before. Just as it was many centuries ago, everything in Russia is subordinate to the will of the "wise" monks. The laws are not operational, the economy is wholly controlled by secret clans, and the courts serve the interests of the powers that be.

That last one can be seen particularly well in the example of the trial in the case of Mikhail Khodorkovsky and Platon Lebedev. No matter how doggedly the authorities may try to create the appearance of justice, the total absence thereof is as plain as day. The prosecution has been given an absolutely clear-cut assignment - to lock the former YUKOS managers away in jail for another couple of decades. And the prosecutors are determinedly working towards this goal, paying no attention to any rules. This all looks like a theater, in which bad actors are putting on a badly written play in a courtroom. The costumes all seem to be right - European, and the scenery is appropriate, and the speeches are grand, but I just want to cite from the classic and exclaim "I don't believe it!."

A multitude of events took place last week in the Khamovnichesky courtroom. But the main thing remained unchanged: as before, we do not know what exactly the ex managers of YUKOS are being charged with. The defense continued to insist that the investigators had no cause to initiate a criminal case in the first place. Furthermore, nobody has ever uncovered either a fact of a shortfall of oil or a fact of the seizure of shares. After all, to secretly steal oil from yourself (Khodorkovsky was the owner of the company) is not possible. Just like it is not possible to steal registered paperless shares - their bearers would certainly have noticed the loss. All that is had in the bill of indictment is merely a wishful legal assessment of the company's business activity. An actual description of the criminal act supposedly committed, without which a trial is impossible from the point of view of criminal law, is completely lacking.

In this connection, it comes as no surprise that Khodorkovsky and Lebedev responded in the negative to the judge's mandatory question about whether the defendants understand the charge that has been lodged. But they did not stop at just this "nyet." They filed around 30 motions, in which they concretely indicated what is incomprehensible to them and what requires separate clarification. As an example, Mikhail Khodorkovsky asked the prosecutors: what sense do they put into this or that term contained in the bill of indictment; what do they mean by the object of the theft (for some reason, the investigators did not trouble themselves to concretize this question), where did the description of the event of the crime - the place, time, method of its commission - disappear to?

Besides this, the lawyers and their clients requested the withdrawal of prosecutors Shokhin and Lakhtin. In the opinion of the defense, the given personages have a vested interest in the outcome of the case and do not desire to clarify the essence of the charge that has been lodged. They've ignored gross procedural violations (searches and removals of documents unsanctioned by a court, physical and psychological pressure on witnesses), which bears witness that they are aiding and abetting unlawful methods of gathering evidence.

Besides this, in the words of the defense lawyers, the prosecutors are thoroughly unprepared. They interpret the norms of the laws of the Civil Code erroneously, and are completely unversed in elementary concepts of business law. For example, Lakhtin remains convinced to this day that the export of oil is identical to its legalization.
The defenders have insisted on the withdrawal of the prosecutors for yet another reason. At the trial in the Khamovnichesky Court, the prosecutors have effectively managed to achieve a restriction of the rights of journalists, demanding that transmission of the trial to the press room be shut off. Well, their desire to close the doors on the trial is perfectly explicable. The tenuousness of the charges, and the unprofessionalism of the prosecutors are just way too obvious...

To universal astonishment, the judge fulfilled the prosecution's request, without even asking the lawyers and the defendants for their opinion. And he did not withdraw the prosecutors from the trial, denying the defense's motion without providing any reasoning.

As concerns the defendants' motions, the prosecutor's office took a highly contradictory position. The men (Shokhin and Lakhtin) were adamant that the essence of the charge is comprehensible to the defendants - look, this follows from their motions. The women (Ibragimova and Kovalikhina), in their turn, insisted that the motions filed bear a "frivolous" character. On the whole, this all resembled hysterics. When you have nothing to say, all that is left to do is scream.

And in general, in the opinion of the prosecution, all this multitude of motions is being filed by the defense only in order to drag out the trial. But was it not the prosecutors who read out two absolutely identical 145-page narratives of the bill of indictment during the course of the entire previous week? Instead of complying with the law themselves, they have accused the defense lawyers of "red tape," in violation of the norms of the Code of Criminal Procedure, the Constitution of the RF, and even articles of the international Convention on human rights...

Furthermore, the prosecution is convinced that the defendants and the defense do not - and can not - have the right to challenge anything or prove anything. From the words of prosecutor Lakhtin, it emerged that "a defendant may express his attitude towards the charge lodged only when giving testimony in the course of a judicial investigation, while the defense may express itself in detail only in final submissions." The state prosecutors even went so far as to declare for all to hear, not feeling the slightest shame in front of the public present in the courtroom, that: "Khodorkovsky's opinion does not interest anybody other than himself and his lawyers"... And that is the kind of justice we have got, that is our adversarial process, our democracy, and our rule of law. No matter whether Russia tries to portray itself as Europe or not - the Asianness still comes crawling out.

Respectfully,
Ludmilla Alexeeva,
Head of the Moscow Helsinki Group