The Washington Post: Corruption Taints Courts In Russia

June 24, 2009

By Philip P. Pan

A spe­cial Euro­pean inves­ti­ga­tor issued a sting­ing report Tues­day that alleges wide­spread polit­i­cal abuse of the Russ­ian courts and urges coun­tries not to extra­dite peo­ple to Rus­sia if they might be denied a fair trial.

The con­clu­sions by Sabine Leutheuss­er-Schnar­ren­berg­er, a for­mer Ger­man jus­tice min­is­ter, are like­ly to fur­ther strain Rus­si­a’s rela­tions with the Coun­cil of Europe, which com­mis­sioned the probe and is locked in a stand­off with Moscow over the future of the Euro­pean Court of Human Rights.

Rus­sia joined the coun­cil in the 1990s, but it has recent­ly attacked the court’s impar­tial­i­ty and is the lone coun­cil mem­ber block­ing a plan to stream­line its oper­a­tions. The court, based in Stras­bourg, France, acts as an appeals pan­el of last resort for res­i­dents of 47 mem­ber countries.

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Testimony of William Browder. Commission on Security & Cooperation in Europe the U.S. Helsinki Commission.

June 23, 2009

”Mr. Chair­man and Dis­tin­guished Mem­bers of the Com­mis­sion, thank you for invit­ing me to appear before you today.

I have been asked to share my thoughts on the rule of law in Rus­sia. Unfor­tu­nate­ly, my own per­son­al expe­ri­ence shaped by fif­teen years of invest­ing in that coun­try con­firms to me that the sit­u­a­tion in Rus­sia is not a pret­ty pic­ture, and it is get­ting worse.

When I first start­ed Her­mitage in the mid-1990’s, my clients would ask me about the Russ­ian hor­ror sto­ries they had heard of share­hold­ers get­ting wiped off cor­po­rate reg­istries, hav­ing assets stolen by crooked man­age­ment or being the tar­gets of cor­rupt gov­ern­ment offi­cials seek­ing bribes. What I was able to tell my investors back then is that while cor­po­rate gov­er­nance was ter­ri­ble, val­u­a­tions were cheap, and investors would make mon­ey as Rus­sia evolved from “hor­ri­ble” to just “bad.” I am here today to tell you that Rus­sia is revert­ing. The investor hor­ror sto­ries that were large­ly fan­tas­tic in the 1990’s are now com­mon­place. The sit­u­a­tion in Rus­sia is going from “bad” back to “hor­ri­ble” ­ and it will be more than just investors who lose out in this process.

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Keeping politics out of the law

June 23, 2009

A report approved today by the Legal Affairs Com­mit­tee of the Coun­cil of Europe Par­lia­men­tary Assem­bly (PACE) has rec­om­mend­ed a series of steps to boost the inde­pen­dence of judges across Europe to end what it calls “polit­i­cal­ly-moti­vat­ed inter­fer­ence” in indi­vid­ual cases.

The report, pre­pared by Sabine Leutheuss­er-Schnar­ren­berg­er (Ger­many, ALDE), expos­es ways that politi­cians can med­dle with the law in four coun­tries rep­re­sent­ing the prin­ci­pal types of crim­i­nal jus­tice sys­tem in Europe, analysing high-pro­file cas­es such as the drop­ping of the BAE fraud inves­ti­ga­tion and “cash for hon­ours” scan­dal in the Unit­ed King­dom, or the sec­ond Khodor­kovsky tri­al, HSBC/Hermitage Cap­i­tal case and Politkovskaya inves­ti­ga­tion in Russia.

Among oth­er things, the par­lia­men­tar­i­ans call for:

• in Rus­sia, a series of reforms to reduce the polit­i­cal pres­sures on judges and end the harass­ment of defence lawyers in order to com­bat “legal nihilism” in Russia.

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