“The Kremlin says Russia is a country of great opportunity. But my trial demonstrates that it is also a country of great risks.” – Mikhail Khodorkovsky
EDITORIALS
Wednesday, June 9, 2010
RUSSIA’S GOVERNMENT has calculated that it needs better relations with the West to attract more foreign investment and modern technology, according to a paper by its foreign ministry that leaked to the press last month. Prime Minister Vladimir Putin has recently made conciliatory gestures to Poland, while President Dmitry Medvedev sealed a nuclear arms treaty with President Obama. At the United Nations, Russia has agreed to join Western powers in supporting new sanctions against Iran.
Moscow’s new friendliness, however, hasn’t led to any change in its repressive domestic policies. The foreign ministry paper says Russia needs to show itself as a democracy with a market economy to gain Western favor. But Mr. Putin and Mr. Medvedev have yet to take steps in that direction. There have been no arrests in the more than a dozen outstanding cases of murdered journalists and human rights advocates; a former KGB operative accused by Scotland Yard of assassinating a dissident in London still sits in the Russian parliament.
Perhaps most significantly, the Russian leadership is allowing the trial of Mikhail Khodorkovsky, a former oil executive who has become the country’s best-known political prisoner, to go forward even though it has become a showcase for the regime’s cynicism, corruption and disregard for the rule of law. Mr. Khodorkovsky, who angered Mr. Putin by funding opposition political parties, was arrested in 2003 and convicted on charges of tax evasion. His Yukos oil company, then Russia’s largest, was broken up and handed over to state-controlled firms.
A second trial of Mr. Khodorkovsky is nearing its completion in Moscow, nearly a year after it began. Its purpose is transparent: to prevent the prisoner’s release when his first sentence expires next year. The new charges are, as Mr. Putin’s own former prime minister testified last week, absurd: Mr. Khodorkovsky and an associate, Platon Lebedev, are now accused of embezzling Yukos’s oil production, a crime that, had it occurred, would have made their previously alleged crime of tax evasion impossible.
Mr. Khodorkovsky, who acquired his oil empire in the rough and tumble of Russia’s transition from communism, is no saint, but neither is he his country’s Al Capone, as Mr. Putin has claimed. In fact, he is looking more and more like the prisoners of conscience who have haunted previous Kremlin regimes. In the past several years he has written numerous articles critiquing Russia’s corruption and lack of democracy, including one on our op-ed page last month.
Mr. Obama raised the case of Mr. Khodorkovsky last year, and the State Department’s most recent human rights report said the trial “raised concerns about due process and the rule of law.” But the administration has not let this obvious instance of persecution, or Mr. Putin’s overall failure to ease domestic repression, get in the way of its “reset” of relations with Moscow. If the United States and leading European governments would make clear that improvements in human rights are necessary for Moscow to win trade and other economic concessions, there is a chance Mr. Putin would respond. If he does not, Western governments at least would have a clearer understanding of where better relations stand on the list of his true priorities.
Leading human rights and legal experts discuss the implications of the Khodorkovsky trial on political and economic freedom in Russia at a panel discussion held in conjunction with the US debut of Sketches of [in]Justice: The Khodorkovsky Trial from Putin to Medvedev.
"Territory of Liberty" by Julia Aryeh
Panel Discussion: The Khodorkovsky Trial – Human Rights and Economic Freedom in Russia
Venue: Dorot Center, 171 West 85th Street, New York, NY
Date: Tuesday, May 18th at 3pm
Sponsors: Committee for Russian Economic Freedom, Andrei Sakharov Memorial Museum, Institute of Modern Russia and Drawing the Court
The ongoing trial in Moscow of Mikhail Borisovich Khodorkovsky symbolizes the challenges all Russians face as they seek to build a society free of fear and corruption. In conjunction with the US premier of Sketches of (in)justice: The Khodorkovsky Trial from Putin to Medvedev, the Institute of Modern Russia is sponsoring a panel discussion in which leading human rights and legal experts will discuss the case’s social, political and economic implications.
Panelists will include Karinna Moskalenko, director of the International Protection Center and notable expert on international human rights who will provide an update on international human rights advances in the US Congress and other legislatures. Additionally, Ms. Moskalenko will provide context to YUKOS v Russia a pivotal international case currently being deliberated in the European Court of Human Rights. She testified before the US Congress on May 6 about Russia’s human rights transgressions.
Sergei Lukashevsky Director of the Andrei Sakharov Center (Moscow) will discuss the human rights situation in Russia specifically and the latest efforts by the Sakharov Center to preserve historical memory of the victims of political repression at the hands of the Soviet regime and promote an open democratic society and state in Russia. Mary Holland, NYU Law’s Director of the LL.M. Lawyering Program, will provide a legal context for recent legal developments in post-Communist Eurasian countries and its impact on efforts in the region to improve human rights. Pavel Khodorkovsky, president of the Institute of Modern Russia will discuss how his organization will continue the efforts of his father who strived to modernize Russia through education and opportunities for young people.
Moderating the panel is Pavel Ivlev, chairman of the Committee for Russian Economic Freedom (CREF) and a long-time legal counsel to YUKOS and its former CEO, Mikhail Khodorkovsky, who fled to New York from Russia under fear of unjust prosecution. Through his efforts and the CREF organization, Mr. Ivlev has raised the awareness of the risks of doing business in Russia and how the release of Mikhail Khodorkovsky would be a signal to the international investment community at Russia is back in business.
Admission: Free and open to the public.
General Information: Dorot Center, 171 West 85th Street, New York, New York, 212-769-2850.
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