Official Russia

The following is an exclusive translation of an article about the second trial of Mikhail Khodorkovsky published in the German newspaper Die Tageszeitung:

New Version of a Russian Judicial Farce

POLITICAL PROCESS The imprisoned ex-oligarch Mikhail Khodorkovsky and his partner Platon Lebedev are in court a second time, this time for oil theft. Observer: Many laws have been violated

By KLAUS-HELGE DONATH

MOSCOW taz | The walls are falling apart, the furniture is disgusting. The Kamovnichesky Court in the center of Moscow is a place of particular misery. The years since the oil boom have passed over the justice system without a trace. It is as though the state wished to show how little it cares for those who pronounce justice in its name.

The second trial against Russia’s most famous inmate, the once oil billionaire and Yukos owner Mikhail Khodorkovsky and his proxy Platon Lebedev, has been in process since March. They are accused of stealing oil. The lawyers for the defense consider this trial to be a new version of the first trial, in which the pair were sentenced to eight years of imprisonment for fraud and tax evasion. They have spent six years behind bars. Khodorkovsky and Lebedev pleaded not guilty at the first trial, as well. “A second conviction for the same offense violates international legal practice,” maintains Khodorkovsky’s lawyer Vadim Klyuvgant. Observers from Russia and abroad consider the case to be precedence setting.

The case is also seen as a litmus test for just how serious the country’s lawyer president, Dmitri Medvedev, takes his own plans to fight legal nihilism in Russia. The first trial raised suspicions that the Kremlin was using the business politics of Yukos as a front to remove political opponents from the field and acquire choice pieces of the company. Will the second trial serve to keep the unyielding defendant locked up because the perpetrators fear revenge?

Next week the reading out of the indictment and hearing of evidence will finish after six months. Valery Laktin has read out hundreds of file folders. “Random fragments, completely chaotic, which prove none of the accusations, and even at times seem to prove the opposite,” says Klyuvgant. The audience in the courtroom fight to stay awake, while the prosecutor quotes receipts for hours. One begins to wonder whether the eternal recitation might be part of a plan to wear down the interest of the observers and the media. Perhaps the prosecutor has nothing else to offer but to lose himself in details and rehash what has long been widely known.

The goal is to gain time. Trial observers conjecture that a political decision on how long the prisoner must stay locked up has not been made yet. They created a martyr willy-nilly out of the ex-oligarch. The initial indifference or disapproval of the public has become quiet amazement. Khodorkovsky has consistently stared the state in the eye. The defendants follow the readings with attention. They sit in the so-called aquarium, a glass cage for the accused. The public prosecutor Lachtin reacted with rage when Lebedev once asked how it could be that from 1998 to 2000 the US Securities Exchange Commission calculated 453 billion rubels of profit from the sales of oil, while the accusations calculate 492 billion. The prosecutor complained because the judge allowed the question. Additional questions were denied for the defendant. On his website Khodorkovsky comments ironically “Six months and no pertinent proof. When are they going to address the stolen oil? The prosecutor just says, ‘We’re not saying.’” Yuri Schmidt, President of the Russian Lawyer Committees for Human Rights is one of Khodorkovsky’s attorneys. He arrives at the sobering summary, “The amount of trial violations, legal violations, clearly false statements and other manipulations is greater than anything I have experienced in other trials.”

Source: Robert Amsterdam