Committee to Free Mikhail Khodorkovsky & Platon Lebedev

It was a colourful assembly which demonstrated for human rights in Hanover, Germany, on 7th April when the Russian President Putin opened the Hanover Fair together with the German Federal Chancellor Angela Merkel.

Amnesty International demanded “More Energy for Human Rights” and protested against the recent harassment of NGOs in Russia. They raised a number of cases as part of their “Human Rights Made in Russia” campaign: In front of the Congress Center as well as in the Hanover underground railway, they highlighted the cases of the murdered Russian journalist Natalya Estemirova, the threatened human rights defender Igor Kalyapin and the AI prisoners of conscience Khodorkovsky and Lebedev.

Other groups, such as the “Society for Threatened Peoples”, voiced even harsher criticism of the Russian President, mainly by pointing to the genocide in Chechnya as well as to the Russian support for the present Syrian government.

However, apart from verbal accusations, the demonstration was entirely peaceful; no conflicts between the demonstrators and the relatively great number of policemen were to be seen.

As usual, the police had the task to shield the politicians from the critical citizens (see photo with policemen on horseback). As a result, we did not see them entering the “Kuppelsaal” where the opening ceremony took place.

Later on, I read that our German Chancellor had requested President Putin to give a good chance to the civil society in Russia. This remark is better than nothing, of course; in my view, however, it is not sufficient. It would have been considerably more convincing if Mrs Merkel had, beforehand, been bold enough to show a small part of the critical civil society in Germany to her prominent Russian guest.

Nevertheless, the demonstration was quite successful, as media coverage was really good in Germany.

Moreover, it is still possible to take action online with Amnesty International in favour of Khodorkovsky and Lebedev and to demand their release, as more than 7000 people have already done:

http://action.amnesty.de/l/ger/p/dia/action/public/?action_KEY=9173&killorg=8614&d=1

By JEFFREY D. KAHN

WHAT is the difference between Dmitri A. Medvedev and Vladimir V. Putin, Russia’s tag-teaming presidents? It’s the difference between officially asking experts for unvarnished advice, and punishing those experts for giving it.

In early 2011, when Mr. Medvedev (now prime minister) was still president, the Kremlin’s human rights council selected nine experts to scrutinize the 2010 conviction of Mikhail Khodorkovsky, who was once one of Russia’s richest men but is now its best-known political prisoner. I was invited to serve, the one American in a group with six experts from Russia, one from Germany and one from the Netherlands. We did not mince our words criticizing the Khodorkovsky trial.

That December, Russian television showed the council’s chairman delivering our findings to Mr. Medvedev, with a recommendation that Mr. Khodorkovsky’s conviction be annulled. But then Mr. Putin, who was president from 2000 to 2008 and then bided his time as prime minister, returned to the presidency in May 2012. Since then, for their willingness to speak truth to power, at least four of my Russian counterparts have been questioned in connection with a criminal investigation. The court order used to harass them refers to their “deliberately false conclusions.” Talk about killing the messenger.

You may be surprised to learn that the Kremlin has a human rights agency. Not only has one existed since 1993, but the human rights council, as it is currently known, was active and respected under Mr. Medvedev’s presidency. Its membership was a who’s who of leading Russian human rights personalities, including Lyudmila M. Alexeyeva, the leader of the Moscow Helsinki Group and a former Soviet dissident.

In the Medvedev years, the council’s work had impact. For example, its study of the death in custody of the Russian anti-corruption lawyer Sergei Magnitsky forced the state to reopen its own investigation of the event. The United States Congress cited the council’s findings in an act named for Mr. Magnitsky that was passed late last year. That law, which was linked to a lifting of trade restrictions, restricted the ability of the officials responsible for Mr. Magnitsky’s death to move themselves or their assets to American shores. Even more remarkably, the council scrutinized the case of Mr. Khodorkovsky, who is still paying the price for daring to finance Mr. Putin’s political opponents a decade ago. He was arrested in 2003 and was convicted in 2005 of evading taxes on oil sold by his Yukos oil company. He was dropped into the Russian prison archipelago, and Yukos was lost to a state-owned company. In 2010, as he approached eligibility for parole, he was convicted again, this time for embezzling the oil he was previously convicted of selling on the sly; he remains in prison today. Many have questioned the validity of these charges, their sequential filing, and the fairness of his trials.

My involvement began in April 2011, when I received an e-mail from Tamara Morshchakova, a retired justice of the Russian Constitutional Court; she was heading the council’s working group on the case. She asked me to write a report evaluating this second conviction. At the time, I thought this might be a chance to shine sunlight on this shadowy case, and that Mr. Medvedev would be more open to reconsideration than Mr. Putin.

Ms. Morshchakova had written to me: “The expert analysis is to be conducted on a voluntary basis and on the condition of confidentiality.” That meant I worked without pay, and without contact with the council, through that spring and summer, before submitting my report.

I now realize that this isolation was a safety precaution, intended to avoid false accusations of expertise-for-hire or collusion. Only when the work of all the experts was personally given to President Medvedev did I learn who else had written reports and what they had said. The six Russians included leaders in the country’s top academic institutions and prominent professors with expertise in legal scholarship, economics or both.

But once Mr. Putin switched places last year with Mr. Medvedev, my Russian counterparts began to pay for their too-public public service. Just weeks after Mr. Putin’s election last March, a Russian official smeared the council’s impartiality, citing charitable donations Yukos made over a decade ago to nongovernmental organizations whose leaders now sit on the council.

Then, shortly after Mr. Putin’s inauguration in May, search warrants were issued under the pretext of investigating whether Mr. Khodorkovsky had financed the “deliberately false conclusions of specialists under the guise of independent public expertise by paying those who organized their production as well as the experts.” I’m told that, one by one, these experts and people they work with are finding their homes and workplaces searched, their papers and computers seized. They are also being subjected to aggressive questioning.

Meanwhile, many council members, including Ms. Alexeyeva, have resigned in protest of Mr. Putin’s return. Their ranks have been restocked and enlarged, but the council now seems a shadow of its former independent-minded self.

Of course, as an American working outside of Russia, I am insulated from the full force of Mr. Putin’s wrath. Not so these Russian experts. Their work showed true courage, particularly because they must have known the risks.

Punishing the leaders to quiet the herd is an old practice for authoritarian regimes, and this message was intended for news editors, television reporters, bloggers and others who would speak their minds to the public. With Mr. Putin back in the Kremlin, it is no longer safe to express an opinion on public affairs, even if that opinion was requested by the state itself.

Jeffrey D. Kahn is an associate professor of law at Southern Methodist University. read more…

By Pavel Khodorkovsky
The imprisonment of Mikhail Khodorkovsky, an innocent man, proves that the Russian regime is rotten to the core

Daily Telegraph 8:18PM BST 24 Oct 2012

Nine years ago today, Vladimir Putin’s regime arrested my father, Mikhail Khodorkovsky, on trumped-up, politically motivated charges. The Yukos oil company he led, then one of the largest in Russia, was subsequently destroyed, its assets expropriated through forced bankruptcy and rigged auctions.

Those assets were in the spotlight this week, as BP and Rosneft signed their multi-billion-dollar deal. As The Daily Telegraph’s business editor put it: “Rosneft itself is the product of assets appropriated – if stolen is too strong a word – from Yukos.”

My father’s continued imprisonment has had a lasting, damaging impact on Russia, politically and economically. And his prospects for freedom are intertwined with Russia’s current political climate.

Last December, Russians took to the streets to protest against their government – for the first time in two decades – following rigged parliamentary elections. The winter of ballot-stuffing melted into the spring of strong-arming the opposition ahead of March’s presidential election. The outgoing Dmitry Medvedev’s illusions of hope were swept aside by the returning Putin’s unmistakable severity. Pussy Riot punk rockers were locked up, bloggers bugged and any non-profit organisation accepting funds from abroad labelled a menacing “foreign agent”.

The centrepiece of Medvedev’s supposed pro-Democracy reforms, direct elections of regional governors, took place last month – but with the United Russia party’s trademark interference. The opposition activist Evgenia Chirikova was allowed to stand for mayor in Khimki, but her supporters were intimidated by Putin loyalists. A pro-Kremlin media outlet bizarrely suggested her association with the Institute of Modern Russia, of which I am the president, was a reason she lost.

Democracy and human rights in Russia remain fragile. But neither I nor my father has lost hope. More than 82,000 Russians voted online last week in the first Opposition Council election. The results are less important than the fact that more than 165,000 Russians registered, uploading their photos to the election website, and risking reprisals from government forces.

But pro-democracy activists still have a long way to go. The paradox of Putin’s authoritarian rule is this: although his popularity has ebbed in the past year, and the opposition movement grown, a fair election – for the Duma, for regional governors, for president – would have yielded a pro-Kremlin result.

Large parts of Russia still prefer Putin’s style of rule to the alternatives. But instead of capitalising on his position, Putin is jeopardising it by cracking down harder, adding fuel to the opposition fire. Indeed, his authoritarian displays, such as locking up the three women from Pussy Riot for singing a 30-second song in a church, have made him look ridiculous.

But Russia will soon face intensified international attention, given its slaughter-facilitating intransigence on Syria, its recent accession to the World Trade Organisation, and its hosting of the 2014 Winter Olympics. The question for Putin is how to hold onto power peacefully, without looking ever more authoritarian, outlandish and out of control.

My family and I hope that part of the answer could be to free my father. I am not naive enough to think that Putin will suddenly develop a love of the rule of law and loosen his grip on the judiciary. Nor do I necessarily think that he cares about coming across unfavourably around the world. But Western governments, including the US and United Kingdom; respected peace activists, from Elie Wiesel to Aung San Suu Kyi; human rights groups, such as Amnesty International and Freedom House; and noted legal organisations such as the International Bar Association all agree: my father’s freedom would boost Russia’s international legitimacy, open up its market to foreign investors and demonstrate that the nation is serious about the rule of law.

My father has stated often that he has no political ambitions. His only vocational aspirations are to return to philanthropy and education programmes, like the Open Russia Foundation he began a decade ago. He does not want to return to oil.

For now, however, his future decisions are hypothetical. Yet as he sits in jail, he remains a galvanising figure – and a thorn in Putin’s side. His writings on democracy and freedom are read and admired across Russia and the world, his vision of a new Russia reverberating in the minds of every one of us. “I am convinced the only way forward,” he recently told a German newspaper, “is non-violent protest with the objective of attaining the liberalisation of socio-political life… the probability of [liberalisation] is extremely significant in the next three to five years.”

If Putin wanted Mikhail Khodorkovsky to go away, he should have exiled him like so many others, to the anonymity of a New York or London cocktail party. Instead, as he begins his tenth year away from us, my father feels closer – his words more poignant, his ideas more likely to spark something revolutionary – than at any time in the last nine years.

Pavel Khodorkovsky is president of the Institute of Modern Russia and is based in New York