Khodorkovsky & Lebedev Communications Center

Leading up to the historic YUKOS trial before the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR), Mikhail Khodorkovsky published an important declaration in Nezavisimaya Gazeta, describing how the machinery of political justice in Russia has the ability to touch just about anyone...not just those who are openly opposed to the politics of the Kremlin, but anyone who falls into the sticky web of police corruption.

Underscoring Khodorkovsky's thesis, the list of victims affected by Russia's broken judicial system is becoming longer by the day.

• Ibragim Yevloyev, an Ingush police officer convicted of murdering journalist Magomed Yevloyev, has been released after serving only three months of an amusingly lenient two-year sentence.
• Anatoly Barkov, vice president of LUKoil, the same state-owned company accused of stealing the assets from YUKOS, recently entered controversy when he escaped all penalties and suffered no police investigations after killing two women in a head-on automotive collision. (Based on the news coverage in Russia, there is an ongoing investigation. But initially they tried to sweep everything under the rug)
• Vasily Astrashabov, a 19-year-old Moscow student, was apparently falsely accused of a violent attack by a policeman who wanted to wrap up the case quickly. His father said: "Law enforcement officers did all this to report that they had solved a crime while in hot pursuit of the suspects, and this has led to accusations against a person who didn't commit the crime."
• Jamison Firestone, founding partner of the law firm Firestone Duncan, was chased out of the country on unfounded tax charges after challenging the misled and sabotaged investigation into the murder by medical blackmail of Sergei Magnitsky.

The list goes on and on, and these are only examples from the last month. The point made by Khodorkovsky in his Nezavisimaya Gazeta article, is that there is a false hope that his case, and the destruction of YUKOS, is a "one-off" phenomenon - that it was only Khodorkovsky, and this one company, who would fall prey to the predatory forces inside the government. Instead, we see that the entire system has adapted to politicized justice.

Upon reading the Khodorkovsky's article, Yana Yakovleva, the former businesswoman and head of NGO Business Solidarity, was quoted by Osobaya Bukva as saying: "Without doubt, the conclusions that Khodorkovsky drew in his newspaper article are that this is all a generalization of the situation in Russia between those enforcing the law and the courts. It doesn't matter who you are. You may have worked for the local domicile registration office, you may have been a businessman: both of you will come across one and the same problems. It is a factory production line that consumes people, without a thought for the accusations they face. Its main concern is to process its victims and dispatch them to the camps."

And it is in this respect that Khodorkovsky makes his strongest point in the article - that the longer the Russian people are denied their right to fair and independent justice, the greater the anguish, anger, and rejection will grow toward the authoritarian social bargain.

By James Kimer, Guest Commentator to the Khodorkovsky and Lebedev Communications Center