Today, the Basmanny court dismissed Mikhail Khodorkovsky’s defence’s appeal. If the appeal had been successful (including for the Basmanny court), it could have resulted in the termination of the prosecution against Khodorkovsky. The appeal was filed on March 28 – and at the time it mainly concerned the abuses of the defendant’s rights. The hearing of the case was repeatedly postponed and the emergence of new violations changed the initial concept of the appeal. By today’s final hearing, the appeal had grown to 21 pages in which Karinna Moskalenko spelt out all the substantiated (constitutional) violations of Khodorkovsky’s rights in his second case.

She pointed out the number of violations and their nature, and in response to violations of authorized bodies, the defence demonstrated that “in the given case there is abuse of rights by the prosecution in the criminal case aimed at restricting the rights of the individual for purposes other than legal ones”. Speaking about “other purposes”, the defence implies that Khodorkovsky was deprived of the right to a fair trial because of the politically motivated nature of his case.

The complex nature of the appeal made it possible to depict both widely known violations (illegal investigations in Chita) and violations which have not been much spoken about (illegal creation of prejudice). It is the creation of prejudice – a legal provision when a verdict passed in one criminal case is accepted as a basis of the verdict in another criminal case and virtually predetermines the outcome of the second verdict – which violates the principle of presumption of innocence. A heavy sentence passed on Vladimir Malakhovsky and Vladimir Pereverzin imposes a prejudicial effect on Khodorkovsky’s second case. “The case gets split up into several parts,” Moskalenko told the hearing. “One of them is heard privately (such as the Malakhovsky and Pereverzin case) but has an impact on a whole number of other people (Khodorkovsky and Lebedev). After creation of prejudice, Khodorkovsky is doomed on a number of aspects and has no access to justice,” she said.

The appeal also makes a point in stressing the intimidation of lawyers by the Prosecutor General’s office (winter detentions in airports that resulted in the study of lawyers’ files right before the flight, the demand by the Prosecutor General’s office to take flights to Chita the following day after receiving a corresponding notice, and finally the move to strip Khodorkovsky’s defense attorneys of their lawyer’s status). Moskalenko told the court that Khodorkovsky considered violations of his lawyers’ rights as violations of his own right to defence. “My client and many experts believe that it is exactly the aggressive intimidation of the defence that reflects the hostile attitude of the Prosecutor General’s office towards our case,” she emphasised.

After learning of the court’s ruling, Moskalenko said she was ready to file a cassation appeal against it.