Moscow, December 20, 2012 – After a two-year appeal process, the Moscow City Court today upheld the guilty verdict handed down at the end of the second trial of Mikhail Khodorkovsky and Platon Lebedev in December 2010, although sentencing was reduced from 13 years to 11 years due to the application of recent amendments to Russian law. If today’s ruling stands, Khodorkovsky is to be released in October 2014 instead of October 2016, and Lebedev is to be released in July 2014 instead of July 2016.

Khodorkovsky and Lebedev were seeking an annulment of the lower court’s verdict, which has been widely assessed by independent observers as having been deeply flawed. The Moscow City Court could have annulled the verdict, ordered a retrial in a lower court or even issued its own ruling on the case. Instead, the appeal judges confirmed the verdict despite the enormous weight of legal and factual arguments undermining it. Today’s decision was issued without any convincing judicial analysis of the appellants’ arguments.

As Khodorkovsky’s lawyer, Vadim Klyuvgant stated in response to today’s ruling: “The position of the defence team remains the same: our defendants are innocent and should be released immediately.”

The decision is the latest judicial farce in the continuing appeal process against the December 2010 guilty verdict issued by Moscow’s Khamovnichesky District Court. Proceedings have been repeatedly delayed, with courts exploiting various mechanisms – legal or illegal – to stretch the proceedings out as long as possible. Khodorkovsky and Lebedev can appeal to the Russian Supreme Court against today’s decision by the Moscow City Court.

The appeal had set forth grounds for reversal of the lower court’s verdict and for termination of the case against Khodorkovsky and Lebedev. The core argument to set aside the verdict was that it did not identify any acts that constituted criminal conduct. On this basis alone, if decided solely on the independent application of law to facts, the only outcome of the appeal would and should have been acquittals for Khodorkovsky and Lebedev, clearing the way for their immediate release since both men have already served the 8-year sentence from their first trial, counted from their dates of arrest in 2003. Although the Khamovnichesky Court’s failure to identify acts constituting alleged embezzlement or laundering was a sufficient basis to reverse the verdict and to terminate the case, the appellants supplemented their appeal with a catalogue of fundamental and irreparable violations of due process that they have endured. The appellants further noted that the verdict contradicted rulings in prior standing Yukos cases in Russian courts as well as the Russian Federation’s lines of defence in Yukos‐related proceedings abroad.

Following their own expert analyses of the second Khodorkovsky-Lebedev trial, Amnesty International, the International Bar Association and the Russian Presidential Council for Human Rights collectively criticised the guilty verdict as groundless and unfair. After a yearlong expert inquiry, the Presidential Council went as far as to call for annulment of the verdict.

At today’s hearing, prosecutors finally conceded that Khodorkovsky and Lebedev are eligible for earlier release under reforms in 2011 to the Russian Criminal Code, which eased Russia’s sentencing rules. Two other Yukos prisoners – and many others not connected to Yukos – have obtained early release by seeking application of the reduced sentencing provisions of the 2011 reforms.

In proceedings that were separate from the supervisory appeal case at the Moscow City Court, in the past year Lebedev twice succeeded in obtaining a court order for early release – in 2013 – under the 2011 reforms, yet on each occasion prosecutors appealed to a higher court to reverse the order as “too lenient”. Those proceedings, which have been underway in the local court where Lebedev is imprisoned, have now been pre-empted by today’s ruling and are likely to follow today’s decision.

Despite today’s seemingly promising development on sentencing, investigators and prosecutors continue to press ahead with investigations against Khodorkovsky and Lebedev, and pursue trials in absentia against Yukos-connected individuals who have fled to safety abroad. Most recently, in August 2012 the Zamoskvoretsky Court of Moscow found former Yukos co-owner Vladimir Dubov guilty in absentia, sentencing him to eight years in prison. In October 2012 the Moscow City Court dismissed Dubov’s appeal.

Meanwhile, applications from Khodorkovsky and Lebedev pending at the European Court of Human Rights concerning their second trial are likely to be years away from judgment.