A particular kind of legal dialogue
The Kremlin, the case of Yukos and an assessment report
Deutsche Fassung
Abstract
The official investigations in the Yukos complex against Mikhail Khodorkovsky and Platon Lebedev still haven’t been completed in Russia. In the autumn of 2013, the German federal government received a rogatory letter by the Russian investigative committee to question the German lawyer and Osteuropa author Otto Luchterhandt as a witness. The reason was that he had worked as an assessor for a working group used by the “Presidential Council for Civil Society and Human Rights” in order to advise President Dmitry Medvedev. The working group determined that in the second criminal conviction against Khodorkovsky, severe and extremely severe legal irregularities had occurred. Following the return by Vladimir Putin to the office of president, the Russian members of the working group were subject to repressive measures. They were criminalised, bullied and stigmatised. The rogatory letter from the investigative committee breathes the spirit of the authoritarian state and legal nihilism.
(Osteuropa 8-9/2018, pp. 41–60)