Nobody Is Untouchable

Opinion Journal ^ | May 15, 2007 | BRET STEPHENS

[Wuli]

"Karinna Moskalenko is Russia's most distinguished human-rights lawyer. Vladimir Putin wants her disbarred."

"Ms. Moskalenko, 53, is the founder of the Moscow-based International Protection Center........"We started with dozens of cases," she says, recalling the IPC's earliest days during the Yeltsin era. "We are now dealing with hundreds of cases."

"Today, her clients include the imprisoned former Yukos CEO Mikhail Khodorkovsky, chess champion and opposition leader Garry Kasparov and the family of murdered journalist Anna Politkovskaya. She also represents......."

"......Still, her current caseload in Strasbourg, totaling about 180, represents the lion's share of the court's docket, and she knows how to get results: Her victory in the 2002 Kalashnikov case--involving a man who had been held in pre-trial detention for five years in cramped and disease-ridden conditions--forced the Russian government to embark on its first serious attempt at modernizing its prison system."

But for sheer chutzpah nothing approaches the government's attempts to disbar Ms. Moskalenko on the grounds that she has incompetently represented Mr. Khodorkovsky--a remarkable bit of solicitude for a man whose sentence to a Siberian prison camp has just been extended. According to a motion filed April 18 by the prosecutor general's office with the Russian registration service, Ms. Moskalenko failed her client in February when she was forced to leave a lawyers' conference with Mr. Khodorkovsky a day early to attend to her sick 14-year-old son. "This [motion] has been decided at a high level, though we don't know who exactly ordered it," says Ms. Moskalenko. Prosecutor General Yuri Chaika was until last year Mr. Putin's minister of justice.

The story of what happened to Ms. Moskalenko on that visit to Siberia is worth telling,..........

[Wuli]

Putin and his mobocracy at work.

[happygrl]

Pray for this woman.

She is dead meat in Putin's Russia.