Russia: Guilty as Charged
Filed under: Russia
Over the course of the past few years, Vladimir Putin's Russia has suffered an stunning series of devastating defeats in European courts.
First, in October 2006, the European Court for Human Rights found Russia guilty of state-sponsored murder in Chechnya. Numerous subsequent rulings of the ECHR have confirmed the Kremlin is responsible for the most egregious human rights atrocities throughout the breakaway republic.
Then, in August 2007, a Swiss court held that Russia's judicial system was so fundamentally corrupt that it would not cooperate with a Russian state investigation in the YUKOS prosecution.
Two months later, the ECHR ruled that the Kremlin's prosecution of Platon Lebedev, Mikhail Khodorkovskys' right-hand man, violated international law.
Finally, in January of this year, a court in the Netherlands ordered a new auction of the assets of Yukos Finance, a Dutch subsidiary YUKOS, after having declared last year that an earlier sale of the assets was illegal because a Russian bankruptcy declaration against Yukos was invalid under Dutch law. And now, that same court has "rejected claims by Rosneft, the state-controlled Russian oil group, against . . . assets" sought by a group of 50,000 shareholders of Yukos "on the basis that its claims had been paid in full during the forced Russian bankruptcy process of Yukos that began in 2006." It ruled instead for the ownership group, dispensing $850 million to them, a decision that "could open the way for the remainder of an estimated $2bn-worth of Yukos assets in the Netherlands to be used to compensate shareholders."
More is coming. Khodorkovsky himself is pursuing the same relief sought by Lebedev in the ECHR, and will likely win as well. Georgia also has a suit pending in the ECHR alleging mass persecution of Georgians in Russia after Georgia claimed to have discovered a Russian-sponsored coup plot against Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili and arrested four Russian military officers In November, an arbitration proceeding will commence in The Hague, Netherlands, before a panel of three respected international jurists. At issue are claims against the Russian government for illegal nationalization of corporate assets, bilking foreign investors in the now-defunct YUKOS oil company to the tune of $100 billion.
Slowly, right before our eyes, Mikhail Khodorkovsky is unraveling the web spun by the insidious Kremlin spiders who jailed him. In court after court, in nation after nation, he is proving beyond question that the actions taken against him by Russia's malignant dictatorship were illegal. He has placed the Kremlin in an utterly untenable position: It must either release him to stop the humiliating court proceedings, thereby freeing him to launch a massive civil opposition action, or it must keep him in prison indefinitely on additional trumped-up charges and face a watershed event in Europe where its basic legal legitimacy is obliterated and its international credibility reduced to the level of Zimbabwe and Zaire.
If Khodorkovsky can accomplish all this from behind bars, it's little wonder that the Kremlin had him jailed. Indeed, one must wonder whether the Kremlin is not already contemplating the Politkovskaya solution.
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