European Court of Human Rights: Khodorkovsky Case

Debate between Baroness Williams of Crosby and Lord Hylton

Tuesday 23rd July 2013 Lords Chamber

[Lord Hylton]

My Lords, I thank the noble Lord, Lord Trimble, for raising this matter tonight. After the end of the Soviet Union, I had a long involvement in Russia with both churches and organisations for disadvantaged children and young people. In the course of this, I met Mr Khodorkovsky when he was a free man visiting London. I was impressed by him and by his efforts to make Yukos Oil a normal, responsible and transparent internationally quoted company. I also admired the work of the Open Russia Foundation that he started, which sought to make the young Russian generation full participants in a globalised world.

I agree that Mr Khodorkovsky may have breached an informal agreement with his Government by taking a position in politics. However, it is worth noting that he returned voluntarily to Russia in 2003 when he could have stayed abroad and joined other exiled oligarchs. He went back to prove his innocence, and in solidarity with his partner, Mr Platon Lebedev, who had by then been arrested. In the same year, the then chairman of the Russian President’s advisory commission on the judiciary said of the trial:

“There are more features of political games here than of justice”.

It is also true that his legal counsel was harassed and wrongly called as a witness. In 2007, the European Court of Human Rights found that Mr Lebedev’s trial had violated international law, and in 2011 it awarded damages to both men. Have these damages yet been paid?

The fate of Yukos Oil was also most unsatisfactory. Its assets were compulsorily sold for less than full value to semi-state companies such as Gazprom and Rosneft. It is likely that the treatment was a breach of the Energy Charter Treaty 1994, to which Russia was a party. The fact that Russia got away with this behaviour led naturally to BP’s bad experience in its joint venture with TNK, and to Shell’s serious problems over Sakhalin Island.

I turn to the second trial, which took place over 21 months in 2009-10 and led to a prison sentence of 13 and a half years. It is highly relevant that it was criticised by Russian institutions as well as by the International Bar Association and Amnesty International. More important critics were our Foreign Secretary and the noble Baroness, Lady Ashton, on behalf of the EU. A further point is that the location of Mr Khodorkovsky’s imprisonment may have violated Russia’s criminal executorial code, which states that convicted persons should be held in their home region and not sent to Siberia. The implications for visits from their family and others are obvious.

A wise former British ambassador to Russia commented on the case in 2009. He wrote that our two countries had many common interests and that it was unwise to expect a rapid Russian evolution to the full rule of law and democracy, but that nevertheless Her Majesty’s Government should stand by the European Convention on Human Rights and Russia’s other international obligations, and should make clear their abhorrence of Russian behaviour in the Litvinenko case, over Abkhazia and South Ossetia and over the cyberattack on Estonia.

In the light of this advice and of this debate, what is the Government’s response? Will they press the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg to bring forward consideration of pending applications by Khodorkovsky and Lebedev? This, along with a strong British response, could prevent the holding of a third trial of the two men. It could also lend some protection to Mr Alexei Navalny, who has already been mentioned in the debate. He is a Russian anti-corruption lawyer and opposition leader who faces a five-year sentence. I urge the Government to take up this matter very strongly and not to let it fade away.

[Baroness Williams of Crosby]

My Lords—