Presidential council on human rights and civil society development has published a report, containing analysis of the second case of Khodorkovsky and Lebedev.

Tamara Morshchakova, former judge of the RF Constitutional Court and a member of the panel, told local media, that in experts’ view Mikhail Khodorkovsky and Platon Lebedev’s verdict was a “mistake”. Morshchakova added that the council had studied only court documents: text of the verdict, typescript of the hearings and other publicly available documents.

The experts arrived at the conclusion, she said, that former Yukos CEOs had been “punished for carrying out legal activities”: vertical integration of the company with centralized management, agreements to transfer assets from one subsidiary to another, and general agreements. According to the founding of criminal law experts, the RF Criminal Code and Russian criminal procedural law does not contain legal provision to “consider them criminals”. The verdict, the experts believe, violates Russian Constitution and European Convention on Human Rights.

The council urged the Prosecutor General to conduct a retrial, and recommended Russia’s Investigative Committee’s reinvestigating the case, “given newly obtained evidence”.

Rumafia.com reported earlier, that the council in July had called for general amnesty for economic crimes. The council also called for “liquidation of negative consequences of the similar cases”. It recommended that the jury trial should be applied if a defendant wants it. Another recommendation was to forbid the police to open criminal investigation without written request from an aggrieved party, and to change the procedure of submitting appeals for pardon or suspended sentences.