Khodorkovsky: Prisoner of Conscience?

Amnesty International declared Mikhail Khodorkovsky a “prisoner of conscience” after a Moscow court yesterday upheld his conviction on a second set of charges, which will leave the former oil tycoon in prison through 2016.

The foreign ministry criticized the move on Wednesday, calling it “one-sided” and “politicized.”

“The evaluation that Amnesty International gave this issue will remain on the organization's conscience," said Konstantin Dolgov, the ministry’s human rights envoy, in a not-so-clever turn of phrase. “Our position on such evaluations is well-known,” he told news agency RIA Novosti in an interview. “It is not positive. We cannot agree with such an evaluation.”

The move raised some eyebrows. After all, Khodorkovsky was one of the most ruthless oligarchs of the 1990s era, growing to huge wealth on the back of a dramatically impoverished Russian people and easily manipulated post-Soviet government. He undoubtedly did many things that he should be tried for – as did all of Russia’s original oligarchs, even though they now all live free (granted two of them, Boris Berezovsky and Vladimir Gusinsky, do so in exile). His first trial, on charges of fraud and tax evasion, was one of selective justice. His second, on charges of embezzling and laundering the money that he was supposed to pay tax on as per his first trial, came just as his first sentence was running out, leading many to think it was designed to keep him in jail.

The debate over Khodorkovsky – and among Russia watchers it rages continually – often comes down to those who argue he should be freed because he is Russia’s savior versus those who argue he deserves to sit in jail because of the awful things he did. I am enthralled with his case because it begs a very human question: can people really change? And we (or at least I) don’t know the answer yet.

The “prisoner of conscience” tag is a bit weird, because Amnesty defines it thusly: “people who have been jailed because of their political, religious or other conscientiously-held beliefs, ethnic origin, sex, color, language, national or social origin, economic status, birth, sexual orientation or other status.” Just last week, Amnesty refused to hand them the “title” but changed their mind after Khodorkovsky’s appeal was refused. “Whatever the rights and wrongs of Mikhail Khodorkovsky and Platon Lebedev’s first convictions there can no longer be any doubt that their second trial was deeply flawed and politically motivated," Nicola Duckworth, Amnesty International’s director for Europe and Central Asia, said in a statement. And the debate will surely continue…