It has now been seven months since Dmitry Medvedev stepped down as president and back into the role of prime minister, but his inflexible position on the cases of Mikhail Khodorkovsky and Platon Lebedev haven’t changed much.

Speaking in an interview with AFP and French newspaper Le Figaro, Prime Minister Medvedev continued to insist that the convictions against Khodorkovsky and Lebedev should be respected as “legal,” despite findings by his own Presidential Human Rights Council

Responding to a question about Khodorkovsky, Medvedev recalled that when he was president of Russia he would often say that “there is a court ruling and everyone needs to observe it.”

“There was a possibility to appeal. As far as I understand, this procedure was conducted and further appeal against the second sentence is still in progress. Finally, convicts have a right to be pardoned. The convicts did not use this right. I am not analyzing the reasons why they have not done so now, but they didn’t use it,” Medvedev said.

If Khodorkovsky and Lebedev had made an appropriate request, “it would have been up to the president to pardon them or not,” Medvedev said, adding that “they did not make it” when he was president.

And so, according to the prime minister, it is now up to Khodorkovsky and Lebedev to request the pardon.

Medvedev also commented that they “have not been in jail a long time” – despite the fact they have now entered their tenth year.