Yury Schmidt’s interview with Internet publication Izbrannoye

Izbrannoye asked Yury Schmidt to comment on President Medvedev’s remarks in Germany about a possible pardon for Mikhail Khodorkovsky.

How does Khodorkovsky himself regard the idea of a pardon?

He and I are not discussing that.

So what are you discussing?

Various methods of active defence.

As I understand, in order for the President to consider granting a pardon, Mikhail Khodorkovsky must himself submit the appropriate request.

I take a different view. The description of the procedure for issuing a pardon in the Constitution and the Criminal Code is very brief. The Constitution states that the President has the right to pardon while the Criminal Code envisages two forms of release from punishment, amnesty and pardon. Apart from these documents the procedure for granting a pardon is mentioned in the presidential decree of 2001 and in the statute of the pardons commissions. The statute says that a prisoner has the right to appeal to one of the pardons commissions through the administration of the prison or penal colony. However, there is not a word in these documents to say that all others may not make such an application.

All others? Who do you mean?

The wife of the imprisoned man, for example, or his mother, his children. In my view, they can themselves appeal for a close relation to be pardoned. There is no ban on this in the documentation. I repeat, however, that this is a theoretical conversation about procedure. We have not discussed the subject of pardon, in any form, with my client.

Let us continue our theoretical conversation. It is believed that a request for a pardon implies an admission of guilt and penitence. I have not been able to find the corresponding text in the laws.

That’s because such a text is not there. In the Criminal Procedural Code there is such a requirement as concerns parole but that norm has been recognised as unlawful in a ruling by the Constitutional Court. As concerns a pardon, there is no mention in any document of the necessity to admit one’s guilt.

(Izbrannoye, 06.06.2008)