Paul Goble
Vienna, October 26 – Russia’s opposition might be close to achieving one of the requirements for achieving fundamental political change – winning enough votes to plausibly claim their victory in an election had been stolen – but unless the courts have the independence needed to rule that is the case, one analyst says, the opposition “won’t achieve anything.”
In an essay on the Kasparov.ru portal, Valery Promyslovsky argues that the powers that be thus have even more reason than ever before to maintain political control over the court system rather than allowing the judiciary to develop “genuine and not just formal independence” as the Russian Constitution requires (www.kasparov.ru/material.php?id=4ADEC9A352C32).
That in turn has two consequences which are sometimes overlooked. On the one hand, the powers that be are going to rely ever more frequently on the judiciary to keep ...
A lawyer for Chechnya's strongman president said Tuesday that a criminal libel case carrying possible prison time has been opened against one of Russia's most prominent human rights activists, news agencies reported.
The report of the case against Oleg Orlov, chairman of Memorial, comes less than a week after the European Union awarded its top human rights honor, the Sakharov Prize, to Orlov and two other activists.
The case stems from Orlov's statement in July that Chechen President Ramzan Kadyrov bore responsibility for the July abduction and killing of Natalya Estemirova, the head of Memorial's Chechnya operation who drew Kadyrov's ire by reporting on human rights violations there.
Orlov did not say that Kadyrov was directly involved in the killing, but said the former separatist rebel and boxer had created a climate of intimidation and impunity that encourages violent retaliation.
Kadyrov won a civil libel suit ...
