Address to OSCE Chairman Dimitrij Rupel from participants at the conference on Politically Motivated Trials in Modern Russia

December 15, 2005

To: Mr. Dimitrij Rupel
OSCE Chairman and Minister of Foreign Affairs of the Republic of Slovenia

Dear Mr. Rupel:

We greatly appreciate the efforts being made by the OSCE to support and protect humanitarian and democratic values and principles, including the right to protection against politically motivated and other illegal prosecution and the right to a fair system of justice. This leads us to hope that special attention will be given to such an extremely dangerous form of violation of the Helsinki principles as abuse of justice for political purposes when this is done to suppress dissent and independent public initiative.

On November 3-4, 2005 in the city of Tbilisi, capital of the Republic of Georgia, a Supplementary Meeting was held in the Human Rights section on “The Role of Lawyers in Ensuring Fair Judicial Examination.” Representatives of bar associations and rights advocacy organizations from OSCE countries took part in the conference. For two days, the achievements and problems of attorneys were discussed. These included, first and foremost, cases of gross interference by the state in the professional activities of attorneys, and attempts to deprive attorneys of their independence.

Participants in the meeting stated that interference into court proceedings by the state, and mainly by law enforcement agencies and state prosecution services, gross procedural violations and dominant trends in favor of the prosecution is especially intolerable in cases in which criminal prosecution is politically motivated. In Russia, one example of such a process includes the following: Yukos proceedings – against Khodorkovsky, Lebedev, Pichugin and Bakhmina; against attorney Trepashkin; against scientists Danilov and Sutyagin; the lawsuit against the participants in the protest in President Putin’s reception room in December 2004, and many others. In these trials, the rights of the accused were infringed upon at every step, beginning with the investigation stage at which unlawful decisions were made. These include, in particular, cases where taking into custody was selected as the form of detention. Other infringements include falsification of evidence, provocation and illegal procedural actions with regard to attorneys, even including searches. During these searches, weapons were planted on the attorneys, like in the case of Trepashkin, or multi-kilo packages of drugs, like in the case of Brovtchenko, by law enforcement agencies.

As a result, each of the political show trials that have taken place in Russia in recent years has caused the government to employ new methods to put pressure on the defence, both on individual attorneys and the whole institution of the independent Bar. Events taking place in Moscow actually sanctioned the attacks on defence lawyers in the regions, where fabrication of criminal cases against local entrepreneurs involved putting such types of pressure on attorneys as their forced appearance for interrogation, and later withdrawal from the case, or even the initiation of criminal cases and arrest. In the Yukos proceedings, Alexei Pichugin’s trial and Mikhail Khodorkovsky and Platon Lebedev’s trial were accompanied by demands from judges and judicial bodies to disbar several defence lawyers.

On top of that, Russia has worked out amendments to the law on the Bar that would bring it even further under the control of the authorities.

As a result, nearly all the achievements of Russian civil society of the early 90’s in the field of formation of an independent Bar, as well as that part of court reform that was aimed at provision of fair and adversary justice, have all been reduced to zero. This attack on members of the Bar became the background for political show trials that have been underway in Moscow since 2003.
All the above stated brings us to the conclusion that in Russia today:

• there is no independent or impartial judicial system;
• the number of political prisoners and people prosecuted for their political and moral beliefs is continually growing;
• particularly violently prosecuted are those people who oppose the use of prosecution as a tool for political repression – that is to say attorneys and rights advocates.

Speaking of political show trials in the CIS, we must also mention a recent Uzbekistan trial against “the instigators” of the unrest in Andizhan, which is comparable in its monstrous cynicism only to the “Moscow trials” of 1937-38.

All this is evidence of the acute importance of the problem of politically motivated, unjust trials.

Unfortunately, the format of the Tbilisi meeting did not allow us to discuss in detail the subject of politically organized show trials. Therefore, we propose that a special meeting (a conference) of non-governmental organizations from OSCE countries on politically motivated trials should be organized. At that conference, materials from particular trials should be analyzed, and reports should be presented summarizing the practice of “politically motivated justice”. The purpose of the conference would be to closely and comprehensively consider the problem of employing court trials to suppress the opposition, and work out recommendations to oppose such practices. Final documents from the conference would have to be submitted to the OSCE.

We believe that the organization of politically motivated criminal trials by authorities in CIS countries is a threatening challenge to the high principles of the OSCE, which is authorized to make diplomatic representations to the relevant national governments.

Text approved by the participants in the conference on Politically Motivated Trials in Modern Russia.
A. D. Sakharov Museum and Centre for Peace, Progress and Human Rights