Khodorkovksy and Lebedev should have been transferred to Moscow long ago, their lawyers remind the authorities.

The defense lawyers of Mikhail Khodorkovsky and Platon Lebedev are continuing their campaign to have their clients moved to Moscow. On 17 September Lebedev’s lawyers sent the appropriate request both to Alexander Bastrykin, who heads the Investigative Committee of the Prosecutor General’s office, and to the new man in charge of the team responsible for the case against Lebedev, Alexander Drymanov. A few days earlier Khodorkovsky’s lawyers sent their own petition to the Investigative Committee, requesting that he be brought back to Moscow.

Until a short while ago the Prosecutor General’s office was directly in charge of the criminal case against Khodorkovsky and Lebedev and should have returned the accused to Moscow five months ago. The Basmanny court ruling, that it would be unlawful to conduct the preliminary hearing in Chita, then came into force. The Prosecutor General’s office took no notice of this decision, however, and tried to over-rule it by invoking its authority to supervise and oversee such hearings. As of today its three appeals on these grounds have been rejected. Changes in the make-up of the team of investigators and the transfer to the Investigative Committee of the case itself means the defence lawyers must now approach new individuals and yet again explain why they must implement these successive court judgments.

An excerpt follows from the petition delivered by Lebedev’s lawyers today for the attention of Prosecutor Drymanov at the regional prosecutor’s office in Chita: “the defence has every right to expect that leading officials of the Investigative Committee, who are duty bound to obey the law, will make good an outrageous and unacceptable situation whereby the ruling of the Basmanny district court in Moscow has been flagrantly disregarded after it acquired legal force. They must now, in accordance with Article 152 of the RF Code of Criminal Procedure (The Place where a Preliminary Inquisition is to be held), carry out the preliminary hearing of criminal case No. 18/432766-07 in Moscow.”