“New Russian Political Prisoners, including Khodorkovsky and Lebedev, Need OSCE Support Now.”
Yuri Schmidt
November 3, 2005
Yuri Schmidt, Mr. Khodorkovsky’s lawyer, and Lev Ponomarev, a human rights advocate, presented a report during the first session on “Access to Professional Legal Assistance” at the OSCE International Conference held in Tbilisi on “The Role of Lawyers in Ensuring Fair Judicial Examination.”
A short speech by Yuri Schmidt included the statement that access to professional legal assistance should be the undeniable right of a person, notwithstanding the stage of the judicial examination. “It is absolutely intolerable when a state deprives a person of that right, [and is thus] coincidentally breaking a number of other laws,” the lawyer stated. He mentioned Mikhail Khodorkovsky and Platon Lebedev as an example. They were to serve a sentence in Moscow or in a neighboring region. Contrary to this, the first was sent to a place that is 7,000 km away from Moscow which one can reach after six hours by plane and half a day by car along a bumpy road. The other man found himself in a similar situation. Thus, both of them experience great difficulty in having access to the kind of professional legal assistance mentioned above. In the lawyer’s opinion, this was done on purpose by Russian officials.
“The new Russian political prisoners, including Khodorkovsky and Lebedev, need OSCE support now, because not only have their rights been infringed upon, but also their lives have been put at risk. We should all help these people,” Yuri Schmidt concluded.
Human rights advocate Lev Ponomarev underlined another aspect of the problem. As he pointed out in his speech, the repression of lawyers is being undertaken more and more often in Russia, both in the centre of the country and in the regions. To illustrate his statement, he also referred to the Khodorkovsky-Lebedev case. Lawyers dealing with the case were subject to searches, attempts were made to disbar them, etc. According to Ponomarev, the lawyers themselves had to apply to legal advocacy organizations to protect their rights as a result of the actions mentioned above.
Yuri Schmidt, Mr. Khodorkovsky’s lawyer, is expected to report tomorrow during the Conference session “Equality of Parties in Criminal Proceedings.”
An international conference on “The Role of Lawyers in Ensuring Fair Judicial Examination” was held in Tbilisi (November 3-4). Over 250 participants, including professional lawyers and NGO representatives, discussed issues related to access to professional legal assistance, regulation of the legal community and equality of parties in criminal proceedings.
ADDITIONAL RESOURCES