Russia’s Supreme Court has announced that an appeal hearing regarding the second trial and conviction of Mikhail Khodorkovsky and Platon Lebedev will take place on August 6. It also specified that only a small part of the December 2010 verdict, which was heavily criticised by several international observers including Amnesty International and the International Bar Association, will be subject to review.

The Supreme Court announced earlier this month, that it would hear an appeal but it did not specify when the hearing would take place, or which part of the December 2010 verdict would be under review.

Khodorkovsky’s defence team filed the current appeal on February 4, 2013. Since the end of the second Khodorkovsky-Lebedev trial, a relentlessly absurd saga of appeals has unfolded, with proceedings repeatedly unlawfully delayed, or stymied by groundless rulings. After two years of obstruction and delays, a supervisory appeal hearing finally took place at the Moscow City Court on December 20, 2012. Despite the enormous weight of legal and factual arguments undermining it, the appeal judges confirmed the December 2010 guilty verdict. Incredibly, the ruling lacked any thorough judicial analysis of the appellants’ arguments.

Commenting on the Supreme Court’s announcement of the date for the appeal, the delays involved and the parts of the verdict that would be reviewed, Khodorkovsky’s lawyer Vadim Klyuvgant said:

“After taking three and half months to think about and examine the case, all that the Supreme Court’s judge could find worthy for consideration in an appeal hearing is the fact that the sentence hasn’t been sufficiently reduced due to changes in the volume of funds described in the charges. 

It just astonishes me. I am not familiar with such a law, according to which it was possible to take so long for the examination of the supervisory review. I do, however, know of the law according to which it must be done within one month after the decision to initiate review proceedings has been taken.”

The copy of the Supreme Court ruling can be found here.