Fragments of a blog
Fragments of a blog
The Guardian reported on the latest twist in the bizarre trial in Germany known as the NSU-Prozess: Nearly five years into the trial of a German neo-Nazi gang who went on a killing spree against immigrants, relatives of the victims have…
Wednesday’s predictable but nevertheless bizarre re-conviction of Navalny and Ofitserov makes one wonder how the court managed the seemingly insurmountable barriers such as the absence of the corpus delicti and the ECHR’s ruling. It’s especially puzzling if, as Navalny has observed,…
It’s Groundhog Day for the Russian opposition and its informal leader: Alexei Navalny said the verdict at the retrial was copied word for word from his first conviction… As the judge read out the guilty verdict on Wednesday, Navalny tweeted out pages…
According to Radio Free Europe – Radio Liberty (here’s a report from the BBC): Russia’s economic development minister [Alexei Ulyukayev] has been charged with large-scale bribe taking and placed under house arrest following his detention overnight in a case that has sent…
I learned of Robert Amsterdam when he was representing Mikhail Khodorkovsky and Yukos as their international lawyer. Amsterdam’s relentless criticism of Russia’s legal system, which he witnessed in action at the first Yukos trial in 2003-4, was spot on but…
Erdoğan’s ongoing purge of the judiciary is unsurprising: apparently, an influential group of appellate judges was one of the few barriers left on his march to absolute power – although the magistrates’ motives may have little to do with the rule…
Vedomosti, the independent business paper, ran this headline today: “Savchenko’s release became Russia’s PR* defeat.” I disagree. Doing the right thing – in the simplest sense of right as good – can’t be bad PR. Even if the world thinks you are…
A jury in Grozny, Chechnya, has found the two Ukrainians I have written about (1, 2, 3) guilty of fighting against Russian troops on the side of Chechen separatists in 1994-95. One of the men seems to have literally lost…
The Russian Constitutional Court has fixed the glitch in the legislation that denied the guaranteed right to a jury trial to women accused of capital crimes: According to Russia’s Criminal Code, regional courts only hold jury trials when the accused faces…
The European Court of Human Rights has unanimously ruled that the 2013 trial of Alexei Navalny and Pyotr Ofitserov was unfair. The principal reason was the prejudicial use of findings from another, fast-track trial – in which they were not represented…
The latest, largely anticipated, turn in the story: Russian tycoon Mikhail Khodorkovsky says he has been formally accused in a criminal case that, according to associates, involves the 1998 killing of a Siberian mayor that President Vladimir Putin has previously suggested…
Putin’s suggestions regarding the criminal justice procedure: He also proposed a change to jury service, saying jurors should judge a wider range of cases but their number be cut to between five and seven from the current 12 at each…