ANY DAY now a Russian court will deliver its verdict in the trial of Mikhail Khodorkovsky. The reading of the judgment is still going on — the longest in Russian legal history — but the writing is already on the wall. The oil magnate and his fellow businessman, Platon Lebedev, are already said to have committed tax evasion and embezzlement, even if their guilt has yet to be formally stated.

The case is being seen as a showpiece in a trial of strength between President Putin and the man described as a politically ambitious oligarch and his Yukos business empire. But it is also a trial of the Russian criminal justice system: a test of how far reform has penetrated the once KGB-driven and repressive arm of the state under the Soviet Union.

Bill Bowring, professor of human rights and international law at London Metropolitan University, is pessimistic about the outcome. He is a barrister and Russia expert who advised the British Government with a six-year project on access to justice and human rights in the Russian Federation. Nonetheless he has more than an academic interest. He was also a witness at the extradition proceedings in March in which District Judge Timothy Workman said he did not believe that two of Khodorkovsky’ s associates would get a fair trial if returned to Russia. “I am satisfied,” he declared, “that there is a substantial risk that the judges of the Moscow City Court would succumb to political interference.”

Of that there is little doubt, Bowring says. “The issue is — is the prosecution for alleged crimes or is it politically motivated? And there is very clear evidence of the latter. An investigation in 1994-95 was closed on the basis that no crime was committed. Then it was brought back in 2003 to help Putin's presidential prospects.”

Putin, he adds, has threatened to “liquidate” Russia’s oligarchs, and Khodorkovsky was a “political threat”. The businessman was given the chance to leave the country rather than face trial but declined. Scores of other Yukos employees remain abroad and wanted, while one, Svetlana Bakhmina, a Yukos lawyer, is in custody charged with theft from a Yukos subsidiary. She is denied contact with her two small children. A petition from organisations representing a million lawyers has failed to secure her bail.

So have Russia’s human rights been thwarted in their infancy? Bowring is well placed to judge. He founded the European Human Rights Advocacy Centre, which is based at London Metropolitan University and funded by the European Commission. It works with the leading Russian human rights group Memorial, the federation’s Human Rights Centre and the Bar Council’s human rights committee. The idea is for the advocacy centre to support its Russian partners in helping victims with cases at the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg. The project now has 70 cases against Russia, as well as others against Estonia and Latvia, and in a landmark ruling the first six arising from the conflict with Chechnya were won in February. There are now 12,000 cases pending against Russia.

Yet human rights case law is infiltrating Russian judicial thinking, Bowring says. “In 1998 the convention’s case law became part of Russian law and it can and does affect court rulings, depending on the judge. There have been some bad cases where human rights law has been ignored, but other good ones — one over whether someone being interviewed at a police station as a witness has a right to a lawyer, and the answer was yes.”

The record on human rights is “hugely contradictory”, he says. Putin came in with a mission to revive the great period of law reform under the tsars, including jury trial — planned for all regions, barring Chechyna, by 2007. Russia signed up to the human rights convention and brought in procedural codes — criminal, civil and arbitration — in line with Council of Europe principles. And £19 million has gone into law reform over five years. “My verdict is that magnificent things have been happening and you have this reforming programme. But then you have an army sent into Chechyna on the basis that you do what you like and forget the (human rights convention) with complete impunity.”

Judicial reform reflects the dichotomy. The judiciary is mixed. Many of its members, Bowring says, are excellent, but many still hail from the Soviet days, when “the standard was ‘telephone justice’ ” — in which judges were given instructions before delivering their verdict. Valery Zorkin, the judge who chaired the new constitutional court, founded in 1991 to strengthen the rule of law, admits that things are in transition. “He has said that until corruption is sorted out, there is no hope of real legal reform,” Bowring says. But Zorkin also points to the ability now of individuals to bring a case against the federation — “unthinkable under the old Soviet regime”. There were 15,000 such claims last year.

Criminal justice is a harder hill to climb. The advent of juries is real progress but the presumption of innocence remains a way off. “The burden of proof is in the law but the question is how to get them to apply it,” Bowring says. The acquittal rates in the regions’ courts runs at 18 per cent in serious cases, but that can be compared with 0.4 per cent in non-jury trials. And prosecutors now appear in every case rather than just one in three, with the judge acting as prosecutor in the rest.

This is slender comfort to Khodorkovsky, whose sentence will send a message about just how committed to justice reform Russia is. His only real hope is that the severity of the penalty might be tempered because of the likely political fallout. “His rating is rising as Putin’s is falling,” Bowring says. “I share Khodorkovsky’s calculation that he may be president in five years’ time.”

Moldovan ex-minister's plight

CHARGES have been laid against the former Moldovan defence minister Valery Pasat, who was arrested while visiting Moldova on March 11. Pasat, who now lives in Russia, is being prosecuted for decisions taken in his time as defence minister in the former Soviet state from 1997-1999. He denies all the charges, which could take six months to investigate.

The case, which relates to the sale of MiG-29 jets to the United States under a nuclear disarmament programme, is suspected of being politically motivated. Pasat is accused of rejecting a better offer for the jets from a third party.

He is a supporter of the Moldovan opposition party, the Democratic Moldova Bloc, and a vocal critic of Vladimir Voronin, the country’s Communist leader.

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