Legal nihilism in action
The Yukos-Khodorkovsky trial in Moscow
The conviction of Mikhail Khodorkovsky and Platon Lebedev as white-collar criminals will go down in twenty-first-century Russian history as an extraordinary scandal of justice. As accomplices of a now all-powerful presidential administration, the Prosecutor General’s Office and the courts fabricated a criminal case, during which basic principles of legality were systematically and cynically violated. Russia’s defeat before the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg is inevitable.
