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Justice is matter of conviction for Russian judges

By Neil Buckley
Financial Times

Published: October 22 2005 02:00 | Last updated: October 22 2005 02:00


Mikhail Khodorkovsky arrived this week in a Siberian prison colony 3,000 miles from Moscow - but now lawyers who defended the former Yukos oil executive against fraud charges are themselves under attack.

Four members of Mr Khodorkovsky's defence team were summoned for questioning yesterday to the Moscow Lawyers' Chamber, which is considering a demand made by prosecutors to disbar them for breaching lawyers' ethics.

They are accused of deliberately dragging out Mr Khodorkovsky's appeal last month by refusing to stand in for Genrikh Padva, leader of the defence team, who was ill in hospital on the first day of the hearing. The prosecutor's office says it has concrete facts that these lawyers acted against the law.

The lawyers say Mr Padva was the only one who could read the entire 600-page record of the trial. Mr Padva says the action against his colleagues is political.

[The prosecutors] are simply taking revenge on the defence counsels for performing their duty, he says.

Robert Amsterdam, a human rights lawyer and member of Mr Khodorkovsky's international legal team, was expelled from Russia last month for alleged visa irregularities.

The former tycoon's international advisers say the treatment of his Russian lawyers, which has included office searches, violate United Nations standards that state lawyers should not face intimidation, hindrance [or] harassment, nor suffer any sanction for doing their job.

This, together with alleged due process violations during the trial, highlights the extent to which Russia is still struggling to create an independent legal system and to overcome the legacy of seven decades of communism.

Even before Mr Khodorkovsky's trial began, a guilty verdict was a fairly safe bet, and not just because of the case's political overtones.

Russia's conviction rate in criminal trials runs at more than 99 per cent. In the first half of 2004, 389,080 people were sentenced in criminal cases and only 3,797 acquitted, according to a report presented in May to President Vladimir Putin by Alvaro Gil-Robles, the Council of Europe's commissioner for human rights.

While commercial lawyers say the civil law system has improved, the criminal system carries heavy echoes of the past. The communists considered separation of powers between the executive and judiciary a bourgeois aberration.

International observers including the Council of Europe and US-based Freedom House agree Russia has made significant reform efforts since 1991, at least on paper. New criminal and civil codes have been adopted. Criminal procedures adopted in 2002 were designed to establish the judiciary's independence and increase the rights of the accused.

Defendants are now entitled to ask for a lawyer when detained, and must be brought before judges within 48 hours. Judges, not prosecutors, now issue arrest warrants. Jury trials were introduced for serious crimes, with acquittal rates in jury cases running at about 15 per cent.

But the same observers say real change has been slow. Lawyers trained in the new rules are still in short supply; many tribunals are dilapidated and overloaded. Judges' pay has been improved, but Mr Gil-Robles' report found judges' salaries were still not in keeping with [their] responsibilities. Urban and regional judges earned Rbs23,000-Rbs25,000 ($807-$877) a month; district court judges - such as those who sentenced Mr Khodorkovsky - little more than half that.

Low pay makes the judiciary more vulnerable to corruption and outside pressure - from the powerful prosecutor's office, for example. Critics say judges have been subject to forced retirement or dismissal for acquitting too many people, or issuing sentences deemed lenient.

Paul Wolfowitz, the World Bank president, visited Moscow this week and agreed with German Gref, Russia's reformist economics minister, on a $50m loan for a programme to increase judicial transparency, computerise courts, and train judges.

Everyone I talked to, up to and including the president, acknowledged corruption as one of the big challenges, and reform of the judiciary is obviously a very important piece of combating that, he said.

The biggest problem, however, may be changing mindsets. Some judges appear to think that to acquit someone who has been detained on remand would discredit the organs of the procuracy, said Mr Gil-Robles' report.