We would like to express our support for you, since it is you who occupy the front lines in the defence of the law, of honour and of Russia’s good name.

When arbitrariness rules in the country, when controlled ‘justice’ is used as a stick to beat people with and law becomes a travesty, every courtroom that hears a political trial turns into a battleground for truth and justice. The battle fought there is very often unequal, so it’s all the more important to express solidarity with those who defend victims of political persecution.

The new charges in the Yukos case are a gauntlet thrown down to society, a signal that all appearances have been thrown to the four winds. The pressure put on Khodorkovsky and Lebedev’s lawyers, aimed at their humiliation, is testament to the fact that the authorities are using all their influence to assist the prosecution.

You don’t have to know the ins and outs of procedural law to understand the absurdity of what’s going on. After an investigation and a year-long trial, they bring new and much more serious charges against people who’ve already been convicted and sentenced to many years in prison - based on exactly the same financial and economic activities they were sentenced for in the first place - after a new investigation carried out by precisely the same people who four years ago ‘overlooked’ the ‘crimes’ they’re now indicted with.

The Russian people still remember what serial show trials of this sort look like. Show trials of men and women already exiled to camps for opposition activities sparked the Great Terror summed up by the word 1937. We should remember here the so-called ‘first’ Moscow trial, staged in August 1936 in the case of the ‘United Centre’. Zinoviev and Kamenev, who’d already been convicted at the beginning of 1935 (in the‘Moscow Centre’ case), were tried for a second time, alongside other ‘old’ Bolsheviks. By that time there was no organized opposition to Stalin’s rule – not from Trotsky nor Zinoviev nor Bukharin. But prison terms were replaced by a gunshot in the back of the head. The intimidatory trials of 1936-1938 were marked by extraordinarily outlandish charges, whipped-up hysteria and the immediate execution of defendants. They instituted a mass terror that bled society white and plunged it into a great fear that lasted for decades - and it was this paralysing fear that eased the way to one of the most brutal, despotic rules of the 20th century.

There are unfortunately serious grounds to believe that the new charges filed against Platon Lebedev and Mikhail Khodorkovsky, and the new trial ordered in the Alexei Pichugin case, represent not just the further torturing of prisoners who haven’t yet been broken, but an important watershed in the country’s domestic life, a preface to political repressions aimed at the establishment of a dictatorial regime and the forcing of Russian society to its knees.

It is especially crucial to recognize that the new trial is timed to coincide with the State Duma and presidential elections.

The defending of rights as a principle allows us to rise above ideological, social, religious and international disputes. That’s why we call on Russian citizens and on political and public organizations to unite, to call a halt to the travesty called the new Yukos case, and to stop political repressions.

We call on everyone to support the defenders of political prisoners.

Elena Bonner, human-rights activist; Lyudmila Alexeeva, chairperson of the board of the In Defense of Prisoners’ Rights Foundation and chairperson of the Moscow Helsinki Group; Yuri Samodurov, director of the Sakharov Museum and Public Centre for Peace, Progress and Human Rights; Lev Ponomarev, head of the Russia-wide For Human Rights movement; Father Gleb Yakunin of the Committee for the Defence of Freedom of Conscience; Lyubov Bashinova, journalist; Eugeny Ikhlov, political analyst; Sergei Sorokin of the Movement against Violence; Boris Lakhnov of the For Honor and Dignity (Kamen-na-Obi) political union; V.A. Shaklein of the Interregional Human Rights Centre; Viktor Kurenkov of the Tula Human Rights Centre; Eugeny Borodin, Ph.D in Law and assistant professor, Stavropol; Sergei Valkov, coordinator of the Ivanov Regional Human Rights Society; Tatyana Vlasova of the Moscow Kupecheskoye Society; Vadim Belotserkovsky, writer, Germany; L.E. Rybina of the Tambov Human Rights Centre; G.A Rensh, chairperson of the Information on Human Rights Centre (Kurgan); Vadim Postnikov of the Tyumen human-rights paper, In the Name of the Law; Yulia Mamaeva of the Tyumen branch of Memorial.

The list of signatures continues on news@zaprava.ru