European Court Says Russia Did Not Persecute Ex-Tycoon
Version 0 of 1. MOSCOW — The European Court of Human Rights ruled Thursday that Mikhail B. Khodorkovsky, a former oil tycoon imprisoned in Russia, had not been a victim of political persecution when he was prosecuted for tax evasion and fraud in 2005. The judges, meeting in Strasbourg, France, took pains to note that they understood the widespread suspicion in Russia that officials had “ulterior purposes” in jailing Mr. Khodorkovsky, once the richest man in the country, who had come out in opposition to President Vladimir V. Putin. But the Kremlin’s treatment of Mr. Khodorkovsky did not reach the level needed to prove political persecution, the judges said, as the charges filed against him were sufficient to explain his prosecution. The judges did rule that the rights of Mr. Khodorkovsky and his business partner, Platon A. Lebedev, were violated in five other ways, though none defined as political. These included holding the pair in degrading metal cages, sending them to a prison far from their homes and families, trying to disbar their lawyers and arbitrarily fining them personally the equivalent of about half a billion dollars for tax dodges their company, the oil giant Yukos, had been accused of undertaking. Though it came a decade after Mr. Khodorkovsky’s arrest, the ruling by the European court still touched a raw nerve in Russia. In its balance — siding with the Russian government on the main question of political persecution but finding that it had committed other violations — the ruling seemed likely to allow both the Kremlin and Mr. Khodorkovsky’s supporters to claim some measure of vindication. More recent trials of Russian opposition figures have been far more overtly political. Since Mr. Putin’s return to a third term as president last year, members of a punk protest band have been convicted and imprisoned and a prominent blogger and opposition leader, Aleksei A. Navalny, has been sentenced to five years in prison. The ruling on Thursday echoed an earlier, though more narrowly focused, decision by the European court in 2011 that also concluded that Mr. Khodorkovsky’s arrest was not politically motivated but did not evaluate the trial on its merits. The decision rebuffed longtime assertions by Mr. Khodorkovsky’s legal team and public relations aides that the fraud and tax evasion case was trumped up after he financed opposition political parties, something that Mr. Putin had asked the country’s oligarchs not to do. No evidence supported this claim, the court ruled. “Some government officials had their own reasons to push for the applicants’ prosecution,” the ruling said, but “a mere suspicion that the authorities had used their powers for ulterior purposes was not sufficient to prove a violation.” The ruling was in keeping with the European court’s practice of setting a high standard for defining Russian criminal cases as politicized, said Jeffrey D. Kahn of Southern Methodist University in Dallas, an authority on the court’s Russian caseload, in a telephone interview. The court’s ties with Russia, which voluntarily submits to the rulings and could cease to do so, is already strained. The decision, he said, requires only that Russia pay 10,000 euros, or about $13,250, to Mr. Khodorkovsky. Mr. Khodorkovsky had requested that sum himself in the event of a favorable ruling on the rights violations, in line with the court’s typical practice of awarding only small sums, though Yukos was once valued by investors as worth more than $40 billion. “We welcome that the European court judgment found numerous violations of Mikhail Borisovich’s rights,” Karinna Moskalenko, his lawyer, said in a statement. “The court’s ruling is of huge significance: Khodorkovsky and Lebedev did not receive a fair trial.” |