Source: HRO.org (info), 08/06/12

· The Courts  · Yukos case

The authorities are provoking a revolution and undermining society’s trust in state institutions,Mikhail Khodorkovsky, ex-head of the Yukos Oil Company, writes in a petition addressed to Vyacheslav Lebedev, chair of the Supreme Court, requesting a review of the conviction in the second case against him, Grani.ru reports. “Today as never before the eyes of the politically active part of society are turned towards the judicial system. No such understanding of the importance of the law existed in 1991, in 1993, in 1996, or even in 2003. Today people want to live under the rule of law, and for the time being they believe that this is possible without a revolution. But the impression is being created that for some reason it is precisely a revolution that the authorities are provoking, undermining society’s trust in state institutions, in legality, in the possibility of reforms,” Khodorkovsky writes.

Khodorkovsky asks Lebedev to quash the conviction handed down by Moscow’s Khamovniki district court of 27 December 2010 and the court decisions that followed. “More than once you have stated that you will probably be a judge in this case, and at that time and not before you will give your assessment. Such a moment has come: it is in your power to quash the professionally incompetent, if not to say worse, decision of the Judge Voronov of the Military College of the Supreme Court of 15 May 2012,” Khodorkovsky’s petition states.

In May the Supreme Court came to the conclusion that, in the course of the second case against Mikhail Khodorkovsky and Platon Lebedev, their rights were not violated. The judges agreed with the chair of Moscow City Court Olga Egorova in assessing the report of the Presidential Council on Civil Society & Human Rights, who stated that the conclusions of the Council could not be taken into account by the judicial authorities since “the Council is only a consultative body and its views have no legal force and have an exclusively recommendatory character.”