Source: HRO.org (info), 08/11/11

· Yukos affair

Former head of the Yukos oil company Mikhail Khodorkovsky will not apply for parole a seond time. He considers the ‘system’ has already given him an answer, Khodorkovsky’s lawyer Vadim Kliuvgant said, Echo of Moscow radio station reported. Vadim Kliuvgant said that he believes the very formulation of the term 'second application’ to be incorrect since it is still not clear to the lawyers what happened with the first application submitted while Khodorkovsky was still in Moscow.

As Grani.ru points out, earlier on 7 November it became known that Segezh city court had ruled that the disciplinary measures against Khodorkovsky for giving a cigarette to another prisoner were lawful. ‘The court refused to rule in favour of our appeal, that is, it refused to accept a violation as a violation. Khodorkovsky has been forbidden to do elementary acts of human kindness, even to give a fellow prisoner a cigarette,’ Vadim Kliuvgant said.

At the end of August Mikhail Khodorkovsky’s lawyers distributed a statement which said that over the previous month two disciplinary measures had been brought against the former head of the Yukos oil company. ‘The first was for giving a packet of cigarettes to his neighbour. In the language of the administration this is “illegally making a gift of objects to other prisoners.” The second was for not leaving the production area but waiting for a technician, in the technician’s room, to give him a new task, when it was not possible for him to do a production task the technician had set him because of the absence of a welder. In the strange language of the prison administration, the statement by Mikhail Khodorkovsky’s lawyers says, this was called “lack of a conscientious attitude to work” and “being in a place where he had not right to be and without permission.”

The lawyers’ statement also said: ‘In Krasnokamensk six years ago everything began in the exactly the same way. There followed other fabricated disciplinary measures for invented “violations”, which resulted in Mikhail Khodorkovsky being sent on more than one occasion to solitary confinement in a punishment cell.’

On 30 December 2010 Judge Viktor Danilkiin, sitting in Moscow’s Khamovniki district court, sentenced Mikhail Khodorkovsky and Platon Lebedev to 13.5 years in prison, having found them guilty of the theft of oil and laundering the company’s profits. Since they had not served out the last half year of the first sentence, the total sentence given by the court was 14 years in prison. Reading the verdict Judge Danilkin had said, in particular, that the reformation of Mikhail Khodorkosky and Platon Lebedev was possible only in isolation from society.

On 24 May, Moscow City Court reduced the sentence given to Mikhail Khodorkovsky and Platon Lebedev by one year. Now the former head of Yukos and the former head of Menatep bank are due to be released in 2016. Soon after the decision by Moscow City Court the international human rights organization Amnesty International declared Mikhail Khodorkovsky and Platon Lebedev to be prisoners of conscience.