NEW YORK — Nobel Peace laureate Elie Wiesel is launching a global campaign to free imprisoned Yukos founder Mikhail Khodorkovsky, whom he calls a "political prisoner."
Wiesel and his wife, Marion, hosted a lunch on the eve of President Dmitry Medvedev's meeting with U.S. President Barack Obama at the White House on Thursday to spotlight the plight of Khodorkovsky, who has served six years of an eight-year sentence for tax evasion and is currently being tried on new charges of allegedly embezzling $25 billion of oil.
The 1986 Nobel Peace Prize winner, author and Holocaust survivor invited about 30 prominent Americans — including two former national security advisers and experts on Russia, the law, human rights and the media — to brainstorm on how to bring pressure on Medvedev and especially Prime Minister Vladimir Putin to release Khodorkovsky.
"This is a meeting to help Khodorkovsky, for he's a political prisoner," Wiesel said at the lunch. "We all believe it's a political case. … He is not legally convicted."
Khodorkovsky's imprisonment has been widely seen as the government's punishment for his political ambitions.
Richard Allen, a national security adviser to former U.S. President Ronald Reagan who is now an international business consultant, said he felt his investment in Yukos gave him standing "to want to have justice done for this man," especially for the violation of his human rights.
He urged Wiesel to move the New York lunch to Washington and invite Obama to try to get his commitment to press for Khodorkovsky's release.
Former congressman Don Bonker, a Washington Democrat who specializes in international trade, said Obama is committed to a "reset policy" with Russia "which is working exceedingly well, but it excludes human rights."
"It will be up to the Congress to take this issue in a manner that's going to make a difference," said Bonker, now executive vice president of APCO Worldwide, a public affairs company in Washington.
At Thursday's news conference after the Obama-Medvedev meeting, neither leader mentioned human rights.
But U.S. Representative Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, a Florida Republican, said she attended a bipartisan congressional meeting Thursday with Medvedev and hand-delivered a letter that she and 70 other members of Congress sent to Obama on Russia's "deplorable" human rights record.
"Reporters, lawyers, and human rights activists are being threatened, beaten and even murdered as they work to uncover the truth about the massive corruption and widespread human rights violations in Russia," she said. "The Russian regime must take immediate action to protect human rights in Russia and end what appears to be government-sponsored repression."
Former Moscow correspondent David Satter, now a visiting scholar at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, said "no one can compete politically with the present KGB leadership of Russia."
Therefore, he said, "only a major international effort that seriously raises the issue … is likely to result in a mitigation of his fate."
Wiesel said he would consider these and other suggestions, including separate appeals to U.S. and Russian business leaders.
Moscow police detained 18 activists with the Solidarity opposition movement on Saturday for holding an unauthorized rally to celebrate Khodorkovsky’s 47th birthday, Interfax reported.
The activists were detained walking between Arbat and Novy Arbat with red and white balloons and T-shirts bearing Khodorkovsky’s portrait.
The activists had gathered to send a birthday card to the Matrosskaya Tishina pretrial detention center, where Khodorkovsky is imprisoned, Solidarity said in a statement.
The government’s envoy to the European Court of Human Rights said the court would probably rule by the end of the year on a Yukos lawsuit that accuses the government of intentionally driving the company, once Russia’s biggest oil producer, into bankruptcy, Interfax reported.
Former Yukos shareholders filed the $98 billion lawsuit against the government in April 2004.