Russia's Champion of Hopeless Cases Is Targeted for Disbarment

"The disbarment proceedings appear to us to be based on very meager grounds," said Róisín Pillay, legal officer for Europe at the Geneva-based International Commission of Jurists, an organization dedicated to the advancement of human rights. Moskalenko is one of 60 commissioners at the body.

"Our concern is that they are part of a pattern of harassment against a lawyer who has been a significant force in defending human rights in Russia," Pillay said. "This harassment conflicts with the principle that lawyers should not be identified with their clients, a basic requirement of the rule of law."

The prosecutor's office declined to discuss the case.

According to papers filed with the bar association on April 16, prosecutors allege that Moskalenko repeatedly failed to show up in Chita, the Siberian city 3,000 miles east of Moscow where Khodorkovsky is imprisoned. They said she was required to assist her client in reviewing case material.

In his letter to investigators in February, Khodorkovsky said that he had other lawyers to study the case file with him and that Moskalenko's principal role was to represent him before the European Court. Moreover, under Russian law, the presence of an attorney when a case file is reviewed by a defendant is a right but not mandatory, Moskalenko wrote in a letter to the bar.

Khodorkovsky was arrested in October 2003. Law enforcement personnel quickly began to harass his legal team.

In November 2003, attorney Olga Artyukhova was searched after visiting Khodorkovsky. Prosecutors alleged that she carried out a note from Khodorkovsky in which he laid plans to obstruct the investigation by tampering with witnesses. Handwriting experts later confirmed that the document contained Artyukhova's own notes on preparing defense materials should certain witnesses be called.

"I didn't want to take this case," Moskalenko said. Khodorkovsky "is a rich man and I had many doubts because, at first, this didn't look like a human rights case. But after they started to attack one of our colleagues, a young attorney, I changed my mind."

The bar association rejected the prosecutors' motion against Artyukhova, but the authorities appealed to the courts and the case dragged on for nearly two years before Artyukhova, exhausted, voluntarily stopped practicing law. Since then, the Russian authorities have unsuccessfully tried to have 12 of Khodorkovsky's lawyers disbarred.

"This is psychological pressure to knock us off our mode of working," said Yuri Schmidt, one of Khodorkovsky's senior lawyers who beat back an attempt to disbar him in 2005. "Every time they file a complaint it requires a lot of time to defend."

Schmidt noted that he was disbarred once, in Soviet days when he criticized a local party committee. "I was saved by perestroika," he said, referring to the reforms and new openness under Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev.

In all cases until now, the bar association, where lawyers form a majority of any panel reviewing a disbarment case, has refused to support the government's attempts to disbar Khodorkovsky's lawyers. But Schmidt fears there is a hidden agenda to the repeated filings .

"At some point I believe the Ministry of Justice will argue that they've filed so many complaints and the bar keeps defending these lawyers, so the law needs to be amended to punish lawyers," he said. Any amendment, he said, would likely replace the majority of working lawyers on review boards with a majority of government appointees.

In Schmidt's case, the ministry abandoned its effort to disbar him when it lost at the bar, but Moskalenko fears that in her case, as with Artyukhova's, prosecutors will appeal to the courts, where they rarely lose. "If the issue goes to the court, I will be disbarred," Moskalenko said. "I have no doubt."