On July 6, the participants of a conference held the day before on ‘Human rights in Russia during the year of its chairmanship of the G8 and of the Council of Europe’s Committee of Ministers’ held a press-briefing in which they presented to journalists an appeal to the leaders of the G8 countries. In the view of the appeal’s framers, human-rights problems in G8 countries merit every bit as much attention as ‘energy security’ or terrorism, say. ‘We contend that there is a systematic crisis in human rights and democratic institutions in contemporary Russia. Keeping silent on these issues will only worsen the human-rights situation and further erode democracy’, the human-rights activists said. Their appeal concluded with fourteen concrete recommendations which, if acted upon, would in the authors’ view permanently improve the human-rights picture in the country. The activists stressed above everything else the necessity of ‘guaranteeing the independence of the judicial branch and ensuring that judges’ decisions are made, in the course of a fair trial, in accordance with the law’. As things stood, the judicial system was ruled by considerations other than the law, according the appeal’s authors; and they demanded a review of the criminal cases in which Igor Sutyagin, Valentin Danilov, Mikhail Trepashkin, Platon Lebedev and Mikhail Khodorkovsky were ‘convicted for political reasons’.