MOSCOW - An analyst suggested that the Kremlin human rights body's recommendations on Wednesday for revising the Khodorkovsky case are an attempt to defuse public tensions sparked by alleged wide-scale fraud during parliamentary elections early this month.
"I think it is one of the attempts to reduce the wave of rallies, make some concessions. Most likely, if Khodorkovsky does get released from jail, it will happen after the presidential election. [Prime Minister Vladimir] Putin may let him go as part of some format of swaps with the West," Yevgeny Minchenko, director of the International Institute of Political Assessments, told Interfax.
At a meeting on Wednesday, the Human Rights Council, a group of pro bono presidential advisers, looked at the findings of an independent inquiry into the second trial of former oil tycoon Mikhail Khodorkovsky and his former business partner Platon Lebedev, and recommended that the case be revised.
Council head Mikhail Fedotov told Interfax: "The council is putting forward an initiative to change the procedure of pardoning. The president is authorized to pardon anyone. Clemency cannot depend on any formal criteria. We believe that changes are needed to the Code of Criminal Procedure, to the section on regulations on the processing of appeals for pardon that was approved in 2001, to remove the limits that these documents put on the constitutional powers of the president."
"We say in our recommendations that the president can pardon Khodorkovsky and Lebedev. He has constitutional powers for this, the right to pardon," he said.
