The FCO’s human rights work in 2012

Written evidence from Pavel Khodorkovsky (HR 06)

1. SUMMARY

1.1 I welcome the Select Committee investigation into the FCO’s human rights work in 2012 along with the content of the FCO’s report ‘Human Rights and Democracy’.

· I agree with its observations on Russia, and the continued inclusion of Russia as a country of concern.

· I draw to the Select Committee’s attention recent developments in the case of Mikhail Khodorkovsky, and recommend that the committee closely monitors these developments while raising human rights issues, including the Khodorkovsky case, in both ministerial and departmental meetings with Russian counterparts.

· I recommend that the FCO consider the upcoming tenth anniversary of Mikhail Khodorkovsky’s imprisonment to be an opportunity to remind the Russian government that Khodorkovsky is due to be released in October 2014 and that it expects to see him released no later than this date.

· I recommend that future in-country reports provide a translation into the respective national languages to aid understanding and distribution.

· I welcome the inclusion of a link to an Overseas Business Risk report on UKTI’s Doing Business in Russia page and recommend that ministers are briefed on human rights issues in Russia and instructed to raise those concerns from the perspectives of their own department.

· I recommend that in order to avoid the Sochi Winter Olympics in 2014 being used by Russia as a diversion from its human rights record, ministers and officials attending the games should be briefed on human rights in Russia.

1.2 This evidence is submitted by Pavel Khodorkovsky, President of the New York based think tank, the Institute of Modern Russia [1] , and son of Mikhail Khodorkovsky, former head of the Yukos Oil Company and Amnesty International declared ‘Prisoner of Conscience’ [2] .

2. BACKGROUND AND UPDATES TO THE KHODORKOVSKY CASE

2.1 Prosecution of Khodorkovsky

2.11 My father, the Russian businessman and philanthropist, Mikhail Khodorkovsky, was declared a ‘Prisoner of Conscience’ by Amnesty International [3] following two politically motivated trials against him. His prosecution and imprisonment have been seen as a watershed event demonstrating the limits of freedom and democracy in Russia today.

2.12 As the Chief Executive of Yukos, Khodorkovsky was heavily involved in public philanthropy and civic society; among his many projects were the creation of Open Russia, dedicated to promoting civil society values and running educational projects for Russian youth, including building a school for underprivileged orphans which continues to operate to this day.

2.13 In October 2003 Khodorkovsky was travelling across Russia’s regions delivering speeches on democracy and calling on Russian youth to become politically engaged when he was arrested on politically motivated charges that retroactively asserted violations of tax and privatisation laws [4] . This October will therefore mark the tenth anniversary of his imprisonment.

2.14 There were two widely-accepted central motives behind his prosecution: to eliminate him as a political opponent and to seize control of Yukos – increasing the Kremlin’s power and enriching certain state officials.

2.15 Khodorkovsky and his business partner Platon Lebedev were found guilty on May 31, 2005 and were sent to Siberia to serve eight-year prison sentences. By October 2007, both Khodorkovsky and Lebedev would have been eligible for release on parole, but in February 2007, new charges emerged of embezzling the entire oil production of Yukos and laundering the proceeds, directly contradicting the existing court ruling of 2005 against the two men [5] . A second trial against them was held from March 2009 to December 2010.

2.16 In December 2010, days before the verdict in the second trial, then-Prime Minister Vladimir Putin said on television, (in reply to a question about Khodorkovsky), that "a thief should sit in jail" [6] . Later that month, Khodorkovsky and Lebedev were found guilty and sentenced to a total of 14 years in prison, triggering widespread condemnation in Russia and the West, most notably, from the US, UK, EU, France and Germany [7] . The sentence was reduced on appeal by one year, pushing their release date to 2016. Khodorkovsky was sent to a remote penal colony in north-western Russia, near the border with Finland.

2.2 Seizure of Yukos

2.21 After Khodorkovsky’s incarceration, the Russian authorities set about expropriating Yukos assets. In December 2003, the Tax Ministry launched the first of what would become a series of extraordinary audits of Yukos’s tax payments, resulting in the company’s assets being sold at knockdown prices. As a result, the state controlled company Rosneft transformed itself from a company worth just $6 billion, into Russia’s biggest oil producer, with a market capitalisation of $90 billion – having spent a mere net $2 billion in the process. [8]

2.22 Yukos shareholders received no benefit in the bankruptcy process – as all Yukos’s liabilities were rigged in line with the fire sale prices. American investors lost approximately $7 billion and the illegal expropriation of Yukos is now the subject of numerous legal proceedings around the world.

2.23 Divested of his interests in Yukos after being incarcerated, Khodorkovsky is not involved in any litigation to secure the restoration of or damages for the expropriated Yukos assets.

2.3 U pdates on the Khodorkovsky case

2.31 Following the second trial, after two years of obstruction and delays a supervisory appeal hearing finally took place at the Moscow City Court on December 20, 2012. The ruling lacked any thorough judicial analysis of Khodorkovsky’s appeal, and despite the enormous weight of legal and factual arguments undermining it, the appeal judges confirmed the December 2010 guilty verdict.

2.32 The hearing did, however, advance Khodorkovsky’s release date to October 2014 - a total of eleven years since his arrest - due to changes in Russia’s sentencing guidelines. The FCO report referred to this reduction, but it remains to be seen whether the authorities will indeed release Khodorkovsky in 2014. It is impossible to rule out the possibility that a new set of trumped-up charges could be concocted to prevent his release. As stated by Amnesty International when designating Khodorkovsky and Lebedev "prisoners of conscience" in May 2011, the two men "have been trapped in a judicial vortex that answers to political not legal considerations" in courts "unable, or unwilling, to deliver justice in their cases."

2.33 On May 19, 2013, Russia’s Supreme Court announced on its website that it would hear an appeal against the second conviction of Khodorkovsky and Lebedev. The announcement did not specify on what date the hearing would take place, or which part of the December 2010 verdict would be under review. If the history of the proceedings against Khodorkovsky and Lebedev over the past decade is any guide, however, the announcement from the Supreme Court should not raise hopes that they will have a fair hearing. Since the end of the second Khodorkovsky-Lebedev trial, proceedings have been repeatedly unlawfully delayed, or stymied by groundless rulings. Khodorkovsky’s defence team filed the current appeal on February 4, 2013. It had previously filed an appeal nearly one year earlier, to no avail. In a statement in February 2013, Khodorkovsky’s Russian lawyer, Vadim Klyuvgant, described the year in between as: "A year of judicial red tape, run-arounds, tricks and direct lies. A year lost for movement toward fairness and justice, toward preservation of what’s left of the trust in courts. The most terrible thing is that it was yet another, already the ninth, year of imprisonment of the people convicted without guilt under a phony verdict."

2.34 The European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) currently has before it several outstanding applications from Khodorkovsky [9] . In a first judgment, concerning his initial arrest in 2003 and his detention from 2003 to 2005 [10] , the Court found numerous violations of the European Convention on Human Rights.

2.35 In December 2011, former President Dmitry Medvedev’s own Presidential Council of the Russian Federation for the Development of Civil Society and Human Rights issued a report on the second Khodorkovsky-Lebedev verdict, finding that "the actions of the convicts [Khodorkovsky and Lebedev] do not constitute either embezzlement or misappropriation" and that the "miscarriage of justice" in the case was so grave and so obvious that the verdict should be "annulled through appropriate legal channels" [11] . The Council’s report was the fruit of a major inquiry into the case that identified serious and widespread violations of the law, finding that there was no valid legal basis or evidence supporting the guilty verdict, and that the proceedings were severely marred by violations of fundamental human rights. More broadly, the inquiry found that the Khodorkovsky-Lebedev case highlighted widespread systemic problems in Russia’s law enforcement practices and judiciary. The inquiry prompted calls for the release of Khodorkovsky and Lebedev, and also for a series of reforms to address the systemic problems illustrated by this case. The authorities dismissed the Council’s report, and in recent months senior figures from the Council have publicly stated that experts involved in the inquiry have faced intimidation and harassment. [12] One of the three foreign experts asked to contribute to the Council’s inquiry, Professor Jeffrey Kahn, in an article in the New York Times, concluded that, "With Mr Putin back in the Kremlin, it is no longer safe to express an opinion on public affairs, even if that opinion was requested by the state itself." [13]

Recommendation: Mikhail Khodorkovsky will this October mark the tenth anniversary of his imprisonment. The FCO should consider this an opportunity to remind the Russian government that Khodorkovsky is due to be released in October 2014 and that the FCO expects to see him released no later than this date.

3. CONTENT AND FORMAT OF THE FCO’S HUMAN RIGHTS AND DEMOCRACY REPORT

3.1 I very much welcome the publication of the FCO’s Human Rights and Democracy Report and the greater emphasis the FCO is placing on the importance of human rights in the formulation and execution of foreign policy. The report provides critical support for the work of human rights organisations in Russia and has the capacity to highlight violations beyond what is possible for domestic NGOs, especially given the increasingly aggressive campaign against them by the Russian authorities.

3.2 Country of Concern Report: Russia

3.21 I welcome Russia’s continued inclusion in the FCO report as a "country of concern," the direct references to the Khodorkovsky and Magnitsky cases, amongst others, and the fact the imprisonment of Mikhail Khodorkovsky and Platon Lebedev is described as "having worrying implications for the rule of law in Russia." I also welcome the mention of the meeting between me and my grandmother, and the Deputy Prime Minister, Nick Clegg, and the Deputy Prime Minister’s call for "the Russian authorities to strengthen respect for the law, tackle corruption and promote genuine independence of the judiciary."

3.22 I note the reference to the reduction of the jail sentences of Khodorkovsky and Lebedev. This reduction was made by the Moscow City Court on December 20, 2012, and was due to the application of amendments to Russian sentencing law made in 2011. However, the Moscow City Court upheld the verdict in Khodorkovsky’s second trial. Klyuvgant commented at the time: "The position of the defence team remains the same: our defendants are innocent and should be released immediately." [14] Nevertheless, if the ruling stands and no additional charges are brought against him, Khodorkovsky will be released in October 2014. It is, however, impossible to rule out the possibility that a new set of trumped-up charges could be concocted to prevent his release.

3.23 I welcome the FCO report’s citation of the Human Rights Watch analysis that the crackdown against civil society, political opposition and minority groups in 2012 has been "unprecedented in the post-Soviet era." The report rightly refers to "A package of restrictive legislative measures that constrained the environment for civil society, most notably a law requiring many foreign-funded NGOs to register as "foreign agents"."

3.24 In 2013 we have seen the manifestation of those legislative measures. I welcome the statement made by the Minister for Europe, David Lidington, in March regarding "pressure on NGOs across Russia." [15] The targeting of NGOs has continued unabated, however, and so far, hundreds of NGOs have faced searches by the authorities and been forced to register as "foreign agents." These have recently included the elections watchdog, Golos, and Russia’s only independent polling centre, Levada, as well as human rights organisations such as Memorial and the Russian branches of several international NGOs such as Amnesty and Human Rights Watch, but have also included charities working in totally apolitical fields such as animal protection. [16] My father has commented from his penal colony regarding the crackdown, writing: "Politically motivated pressure on public organisations is unacceptable. It prevents the flourishing of a civil society which is so essential for Russia's political, economic and also social modernisation." [17] I note also that a precedent for the current crackdown on NGOs exists in the treatment of Khodorkovsky’s organisation, the Open Russia Foundation, which promoted a stronger civil society in Russia. The Open Russia Foundation was subjected to a campaign of harassment not dissimilar to that being experienced in Russia today, effectively resulting in its closure in 2006.

3.25 I welcome the section in the FCO’s report on freedom of expression and assembly. The section noted the expulsion of the opposition deputy Gennady Gudkov from the Duma. In 2013, his son, Dmitry Gudkov, was accused of treason following his participation in an event held in Washington DC under the auspices of the Foreign Policy Initiative, Freedom House and the Institute of Modern Russia, of which I am the president. [18] The section also mentions the charges brought against opposition activist Alexei Navalny, whose politically motivated trial subsequently commenced. Meanwhile, a number of participants in the lawful, peaceful protest of May 6, 2012, referenced in the report, are currently awaiting trial.

Recommendation: Those in the opposition and reform movement in Russia, including NGOs, have limited resources and are facing an intensified campaign of harassment, intimidation and politically motivated abuses of the criminal justice system. To maximise the impact of the country sections of the report, I therefore recommend that they are translated into the respective national languages to aid understanding and distribution. Links to the translated sections of the report should appear on the relevant pages of the FCO’s website, allowing information within the FCO report to bypass state-controlled media and reach citizens directly via social media networks.

4. CROSS GOVERNMENT STRATEGY ON BUSINESS AND HUMAN RIGHTS

4.1 I welcome the inclusion of a link to an Overseas Business Risk report on Russia [19] on UKTI’s doing business in Russia page, incorporating its more detailed analysis of widespread corruption in Russia, warnings regarding bribery and reference to the Khodorkovsky case. [20]

4.2 Nevertheless, I continue to have concerns about the need to give UK businesses clear and balanced advice about the risks of investing and doing business in Russia. The campaign against Khodorkovsky was a seminal event which made clear that in today’s Russia the authorities could and would act with impunity outside the law, even in full public view. An alarming string of cases of murder, torture and arbitrary detention of perceived enemies of the regime followed. Meanwhile, state-assisted raiding of businesses that refuse to pay bribes – or that become too successful for predators to resist expropriating them – is now commonplace. Corruption levels are high, with Russia scoring 2.4 out of 10 in Transparency International’s worldwide Corruption Perception Index – worse than Iran, Syria, Sierra Leone and Pakistan [21] . One in six [22] Russian entrepreneurs has been on trial and approximately one-fourth of the 900,000 inmates in Russian jails in 2010 were entrepreneurs, accountants, legal advisers, and mid-level managers – many of whom were victims of abuse of the criminal justice system through fabricated cases.

4.7 I note also the completion of the multi-billion dollar deal between BP and Rosneft and remind the committee that Rosneft itself is in large part "the product of assets appropriated – if stolen is too strong a word – from Yukos, whose ex-boss Mikhail Khodorkovsky wound up in jail." [23]

Recommendation: All UK Ministers travelling abroad should be provided with a specific briefing of human rights violations in countries identified by the FCO as problematic and given explicit instructions to raise concerns with their official interlocutors in those countries. The Government should institutionalise arrangements so that all Ministers are raising the issue from the perspective of their own department. For instance, the Trade Minister should address the impact on foreign investment, while DECC Ministers should address human rights with regard to the expropriation of Yukos when dealing with Russian energy companies and deals.

5. SOCHI WINTER OLYMPICS 2014

5.1 I welcome the FCO’s continued "support for the rights of disabled people in Russia, which will host the next Winter Olympic and Paralympic Games in 2014." I note with interest also the release of a joint communiqué by Russia, Brazil, Korea and the UK pledging to use the games "to promote and embed respect for human rights across the world." I would be concerned, however, that Russia will in fact attempt to use the 2014 games to deflect attention from its poor and deteriorating human rights record.

5.2 I note that two other political prisoners in Russia recognised by Amnesty International as prisoners of conscience, Nadezhda Tolokonnikova and Maria Alekhina, members of the punk-rock band "Pussy Riot" were denied parole in May 2013 in violation of legal procedure. Both are due to complete their 2-year penal colony sentences in early March 2014, immediately after the Sochi Olympics. I would be concerned that their long overdue release could be used as a distraction from the more recent verdicts in the cases of political prisoners arrested following Bolotnaya Square protests.

Recommendation: All UK Ministers and officials travelling to Sochi for the 2014 Winter Olympics should receive a specific briefing on Russian human rights violations.

28 May 2013