The arrest of Khodorkovsky exposed all the stages and details of the Russian judicial system

Declaration

Five years have passed since an armed FSB detachment seized Mikhail Khodorkovsky in Novosibirsk. One of the richest men in Russia, the head of the largest and most transparently-run oil companies in the country, the sponsor of liberal and left-wing parties, Khodorkovsky was arrested as though he was leader of some criminal gang.

That same evening the Basmanny district court in Moscow issued a warrant for his arrest. This was done with total disregard for Russia’s obligations under the European Convention on Human Rights and Basic Freedoms. Only two weeks before, the plenum of the Supreme Court instructed all Russian courts that they must be guided by the Convention and by the practices of the European Court of Human Rights. Thus began the epoch of Basmanny-style justice and a new period in Russia’s modern history, marked by a cynical manipulation of the judicial system, the fabrication of one political trial after another, and the liquidation of democratic principles.

Today Khodorkovsky and the second participant at his trial, Platon Lebedev, are still behind bars. They are serving an eight-year sentence.

In December 2006 a new criminal case was brought against them. Now they stand accused of stealing all the oil that Yukos produced! For 22 months Lebedev and Khodorkovsky have been kept in the pre-trial detention centre although the court sentenced them to imprisonment in an ordinary regime penal colony. Two thirds of the time Khodorkovsky has already spent behind bars has been either in the punishment cell or in the cells of the Chita jail. For derisory reasons he is refused parole.

No one knows what was the main reason for Khodorkovsky’s arrest and the entire Yukos affair. Perhaps it was the disagreement between Khodorkovsky and Putin at the February 2003 gathering in the Kremlin when the Head of State had to listen to reproaches about the fantastic scale of bureaucratic corruption in Russia. Perhaps it was the active support that Khodorkovsky and the Open Russia foundation gave to the intelligentsia and independent structures of civil society. Perhaps, simply, that part of the “ruling party” made up of the siloviki considered it was a suitable moment to carry out a grandiose redistribution of property.

The most important aspect of the Yukos affair was that the authorities, for the first time since the Stalin era, dared to organise a full-scale show trial. The report by Belkovsky and Diskin about supposed preparations for a takeover by the oligarchs gave a good start to the propaganda bombardment to soften up society. Then the first arrests came, of Alexei Pichugin and Platon Lebedev. There followed the arrests and harassment of dozens of shareholders and employees of Yukos and Menatep and a persecution of defence attorneys that had no precedents even in the 1960s to 1980s. The courts passed insulting decisions that turned the judicial system into a fiction. The sentences was out of all proportion. The sufferings of the dying Aleksanyan, chained to his hospital bed. The cat and mouse game played with Svetlana Bakhmina who was first allowed a trip home to see her children and then refused parole, although she was pregnant, forcing her to admit her guilt in a request for pardon, and threatening that her as yet unborn child with years in a special penal colony.

The arrest of Khodorkovsky exposed all the stages and details of the Russian judicial system, beginning with the investigation and trial, and ending with the condition of convicted prisoners in the country’s prisons and penal colonies. Arbitrary behaviour, blackmail, mockery, malicious objections and fabrications, twisting the principles of the law into its opposite — the usual range of lawless practices which ordinary people so often encounter, and which its practitioners try to conceal from society, was displayed as in some terrifying reality show.

Yet no matter how great the attention, paid not only in Russia but in the world as a whole, to the changing fortunes of the Yukos affair, the authorities cynically and demonstratively transformed and continue to transform all their own laws and legal codes into pointless scraps of paper. It turns out that a criminal case can be instigated twice for one and the same events. It turns out that Muscovites can be sent to serve prison sentences thousands of kilometres from home. It turns out that deeds committed in Moscow may be investigated in Chita. It turns out that one of the organisers of the persecution of Yukos can openly receive an enormous and highly profitable oil company. And, it turns out, the head of state finds nothing shameful in publicly approving such a deal. After 440 years Russia returned to the practices of Ivan the Terrible’s oprichnina, when powerful retainers seized the property of those who fell out of favour. Then the practise became part of the system.

During these five Yukos years we have been transformed into a State with dozens of political prisoners; where the authorities issue a certificate for the right to be a businessman, a politician or a public figure; where it is laughable to talk seriously about legality or justice.

We consider such a state of things to be unacceptable and intolerable. Russia has found itself on the brink not only of the destruction of civil society but of a mutual “judicial” war between power groupings and clans, on the brink of purges. This is destroying the State. Our country must begin the difficult path to the restoration of the law. The first step should be the release of political prisoners and an end to the persecution of dissidents.

We demand a rapid re-examination of the disgraceful Yukos affair and the release of all convicted and arrested as part of that case.

Ludmila Alexeyeva, chair of the Moscow Helsinki Group, chair of the board of the Defence of prisoners’ rights foundation

Valery Borshchev, member of the Moscow Helsinki Group
Vladimir Bukovsky, writer
Svetlana Gannushkina, Civil Aid society
Lidia Grafova, coordinating council for aid to those forced to resettle
Sergei Kovalyov, Andrei Sakharov foundation
Lev Ponomaryov, For human rights movements

Boris Pustintsev and Yury Vdovin, Civil oversight human rights organisation (St Petersburg)