President Dmitry Medvedev pardoned 21 people on Orthodox Christmas, a solid departure from the trend set by his predecessor, Vladimir Putin, who pardoned fewer and fewer people until only one person was released in 2008, his last year in the Kremlin.
All the inmates pardoned by Medvedev on Jan. 7 were first-time offenders convicted of minor crimes, the Kremlin said in a statement on its web site.
Last year, Medvedev pardoned a total of 28 people. But he resisted pressure from human rights activists to pardon former Yukos lawyer Svetlana Bakhmina, a mother of two who gave birth to a third child while serving a seven-year prison term on disputed fraud charges. She was freed early by a court last year, and many observers believe that her release was sanctioned by the Kremlin in a gesture to appease critics.
Medvedev has made the liberalization of the justice system one of his priorities as president, and he dismissed about 20 officials after the death of Hermitage Capital lawyer Sergei Magnitsky in a pretrial detention in a Moscow prison in November.
Medvedev criticized the severity of punishment for petty crimes routinely meted out in Russian courts during an interview with the heads of the country’s three main television channels last month.
“I looked through documents about issuing pardons several times. They were a rather sad thing to look through,” he said. “When a person stole a hat worth 500 rubles [$15], he was given a two-year sentence. Why? Will he become a better person after he is released?”
The president is endowed with the right to grant pardons by the Constitution. Although Putin only granted one pardon in 2008, he was more generous during his first years in power, granting pardons to 187 people in 2003, but still far behind President Boris Yeltsin, who pardoned thousands of people every year in the 1990s.
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