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RIA Novosti
Bad news for wanted Russian expatriates in London

03/07/2006 11:01

MOSCOW. (RIA Novosti political commentator Vladimir Simonov)

Hoping to succeed where his predecessor Vladimir Ustinov failed, new Russian Prosecutor General Yuri Chaika has launched an effort to have scores of London-based Russian criminal suspects extradited.

To find out why extradition cases have failed one after another, Chaika has deployed a joint team of experts to London. Prosecutors, Justice Ministry officials, and diplomats will meet with attorneys from England and Wales to analyze the cases of individuals included on Russian and sometimes Interpol wanted lists. The experts have been thoroughly briefed and given instructions to either find out exactly what kind of evidence British courts need to uphold extradition requests, or - if some fault is found with British judicial procedures, which is also possible - ask the courts to resume the hearings in a way acceptable to the United Kingdom.

Whatever Chaika's motives, he should be aware of the power of the fortress he has vowed to storm. The British judiciary, with its legendary thoroughness and willingness to double-check every comma in the law, is also famous for its extreme aversion to anything that might look like external pressure - media campaigns, ministerial remarks, to say nothing of foreign incursions on British soil.

It is, however, exactly the British thoroughness and willingness to double-check that the Russian prosecutors will try to use.

The test case for the new approach will be the No. 1 man on Russia's most-wanted list, the self-exiled oligarch Boris Berezovsky. His extradition has repeatedly been blocked, most recently by Chief London Magistrate Judge Timothy Workman on the grounds that the U.K. had given Berezovsky political asylum two years before, which put him under the protection of the Geneva Conventions and the 1951 UN Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees.

Indeed, Berezovsky was declared a refugee in defiance of the fact that Russia had sought to try him on multiple white-collar theft charges. Back then, Berezovsky's deposits in British banks and the renewed vigour he brought to the local real estate market seemed more important than the legal request of a supposedly friendly nation. The suspected criminal was therefore not only declared a refugee but also given a new passport with an assumed name, Platon Elenin.

The British, however, were unaware of one little thing. Hardly anyone could imagine that Berezovsky, a.k.a. Elenin, would use his safe haven for aggressive, even ardent, activity to bring about what he himself termed the "forced overthrow of the government."

"Any violence on the part of the opposition will be justified today," he told the Moscow-based Ekho Moskvy radio station in January. "This applies to a forced overthrow of the government as well, which is exactly what I am working on."

From his London villa, the ex-oligarch is focusing his armed-struggle activities not only on Moscow, where the task is to overthrow the "abominable autocrat" Vladimir Putin, but also on Kiev, where he has the opposite objective: to help propel compliant political forces to power. Recently, Ukrainian and Russian newspapers published what is said to be the transcript of a telephone conversation between Berezovsky and Yulia Tymoshenko in late 2004, when the Orange Revolution in Ukraine was at its peak:

"Berezovsky: What the hell are you waiting for in the square? You should lead people there, now! You must take the institutions of power into your own hands...

Tymoshenko: Yes, my Boris... We will be seizing one site per day starting tomorrow. Railways, airports - business as usual..."

Jack Straw, who headed the Foreign & Commonwealth Office at the time, seemed to be so heavily struck by Berezovsky's putsch aspirations that he threatened to strip him of his refugee status. His message was that someone who had been granted protection should be content to live in freedom rather than "use the U.K. as a base from which to foment violent disorder" in other countries.

British judges are now making a point of their lack of political bias. They say they do not much care who will lead the Kremlin: either Putin or his anointed successor, or Berezovsky or his handpicked choice. They could not care less which colour the next Ukrainian government is. Or so they say. Regardless, they should care about their country being abused by someone who organizes, inspires and funds the overthrow of a foreign government. In this light, blocking an extradition case against someone who is directly involved in such activities looks pretty much like wilful neglect of what lawyers call "newly discovered evidence."

Another possibility is that Judge Workman may have been sending a signal to his government that Berezovsky, in order to be subject to extradition, must first be formally stripped of his refugee status - exactly what Jack Straw had threatened to do. We have yet to see which theory is closer to reality, but in any case Russian legal experts will have much to talk about with their British counterparts.

These talks will also have implications in the case of Akhmed Zakayev, another celebrity Russian exile, who has seven blocked extradition requests under his belt. The British probably believed there were two Zakayevs, one charged with organizing bandit groups, abducting and torturing people (including personally chopping off their fingers with an axe), and killing 302 (including two priests), the other a charming gentleman living the high life under the patronage of Vanessa Redgrave and another charming gentleman called Boris Berezovsky. They may also have believed the Chechen terror campaign was in fact some kind of sacred war of independence, which automatically made Zakayev, the "deputy prime minister" and then "foreign minister" of the so-called "Republic of Ichkeria," an exiled political figure who certainly deserved protection.

The recent killing of four Russian diplomats by an Iraq-based terrorist group has turned the tables. Al-Qaeda terrorists' demands for the withdrawal of Russian troops from Chechnya bring Chechen "militants" into the fold of global terror and rewrite the "official" ranking of international terrorists. The new list should probably put Zakayev ahead of Basayev, Al Zawahiri, and the late Al Zarqawi because those three are out there in the woods and caves, while this one lives next door, wears a tailored suit and relaxes at London theatres and nightclubs.

The people whom Zakayev represents in London are not just targeting Russia. They are also targeting what the people of Chechnya voted for in a referendum because they were fed up with Sharia law, public executions without trial, legalized slavery, and other "merits" of the Wahhabi medievalism that flourished in the region while Zakayev played with ministerial titles in an independent government.

In other words, future dialogue between Russian prosecutors and British attorneys should involve many references to "newly discovered evidence."

http://en.rian.ru/analysis/20060703/50805984.html