Mikhail Khodorkovsky’s legal team has responded to reports in the Russian media from anonymous sources in the Investigative Committee that members of the Russian Presidential Human Rights Council (which recently reviewed Khodorkovsky and Lebedev’s second trial – finding multiple violations and arguing for their amnesty) were connected to Yukos.

Speaking to Interfax, Khodorkovsky’s Yuri Schmidt said in response:

“This is absolutely stupid. All of the experts – both Russian and foreign – are absolutely independent. It was never a secret to anyone that among members of the Human Rights Council under the Russian Federation’s President there are people from organizations that had been financed by Open Russia, but it was done by the foundation, and not by Yukos or Mikhail Khodorkovsky.”

He noted that the information about the assistance provided by the foundation to social activists is “old news”.

In addition, those with connections to Open Russia, including veteran human rights campaigner Lyudmila Alexeyeva and Irina Yasina, who sit on the 40-member Council for Human Rights, were not members of the nine-person expert working group, who actually performed the analyses. All of those people were vetted for their independence. They are not Council members and they do not have ties to Open Russia.

The Council’s recommendations to grant amnesty to Khodorkovsky and Lebedev were based on this working group’s findings and were drawn up by Tamara Morshchakova, a retired justice of the Russian Constitutional Court and and Mikhail Fedotov, Chairman of the Council.

Meanwhile, as pointed out by Mikhail Fedotov, the Investigative Committee’s attempt to discredit the Council is “futile” and they should look at the substance produced by the working group rather than try to discredit the Council’s work by raising past connections of a minority of Council people to Open Russia.

About the Inquiry

The Council’s inquiry on the second Khodorkovsky trial was conducted from April to December 2011 by a multidisciplinary group of nine independent experts vetted for conflicts of interest and working without remuneration. While constituted mostly of Russians, the group of nationally and internationally renowned figures also included experts from Germany, the Netherlands and the United States. The experts were mandated to study the second Khodorkovsky trial for compliance with Russian and international norms, to identify trends in Russia’s judicial and law enforcement practice and to elaborate possible recommendations for reform.

Experts who participated in the inquiry included: Ferdinand Feldbrugge, Leiden University, The Netherlands; Sergei Guriev, New Economic School, Moscow, Russia; Jeffrey Kahn, SMU Dedman School of Law, Dallas, Texas, United States; Otto Luchterhandt, University of Hamburg, Germany; Anatoly Naumov, Academy of the General Prosecutor’s Office of the Russian Federation, Moscow, Russia; Oksana Oleynik, National Research University Higher School of Economics, Moscow, Russia; Alexey Proshlyakov, Ural State Law Academy, Yekaterinburg, Russia; Mikhail Subbotin, Institute of World Economy and International Relations of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Moscow, Russia; Astamur Tedeev, National Research University Higher School of Economics, Moscow, Russia.