U.S. Senate on Khodorkovsky

June 6, 2011

The U.S. Senate is concerned about the situation surrounding jailed former Yukos CEO Mikhail Khodorkovsky and Hermitage lawyer Sergei Magnitsky, who died in pretrial detention after accusing government officials of fraud, a senior senator told Interfax.

"When you read the accounts of Khodorkovsky's case in the European press and the U.S. press, you get a strong impression that you do not have an independent judiciary, especially in the second round of decisions," said Patrick Leahy, chairman of the Senate Committee on the Judiciary.

"In the other case, again without going into the facts, we have a person who was ill and was being held in prison without anybody being able to at least take care of the illness," Leahy said of Magnitsky. "That's totally wrong. That would be unacceptable in any country, unacceptable in this case or in so many others we have heard about in the past."

(MT)

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