By Anton Troianovski
Special to The Washington Post
Saturday, August 25, 2007; A11

MOSCOW, Aug. 24 -- Switzerland's supreme court has issued an unusual, high-profile rebuke to the Kremlin, ruling that Russia's continuing investigation of the Yukos oil company is politically motivated. The court ordered Swiss authorities not to turn over bank documents that Russia is seeking in connection with the case.

The decision, disclosed on Thursday, said that Russian authorities' pursuit of what was once Russia's largest oil company had a "political and discriminatory character . . . underlined by the infringement of human rights and of the right to defense."

Following the ruling, Swiss authorities said Friday that they had unfrozen about $250 million in bank accounts linked to Yukos, news agencies reported. The released accounts represented what was left of about $5 billion that was frozen in Switzerland in 2004 after Russia began investigating Yukos and its former chief, Mikhail Khodorkovsky, for a variety of alleged financial crimes. Most of that money had already been released to account holders.

The developments in Switzerland undermine Russia's efforts to portray the case against Yukos, whose assets were forcibly auctioned off and largely bought by the state oil company Rosneft, as an investigation with a sound legal foundation.

The legal actions against the company were organized "by the powers in place with the goal of putting to heel the class of rich people known as 'oligarchs' and sidelining potential or declared political adversaries," the ruling said.

Lawyers for Khodorkovsky, who is serving an eight-year sentence in a prison camp in Siberia, hailed the Swiss ruling as likely to help in their appeals in Russia and at the European Court of Human Rights.

"This decision . . . says more eloquently than anything a defender of Khodorkovsky can say about what the true basis" of the legal attack has been, Robert Amsterdam, a lawyer for Khodorkovsky, said to reporters in a conference call. He suggested that Russian "impunity" in the Yukos case "is starting to meet its match when it runs up against courts in rule-of-law countries."

Amsterdam said it was the first time that the Swiss court had rejected an international request for legal assistance on grounds that a case was politically motivated. Maria Schnebli, a Swiss federal prosecutor who helped represent the Russian side in the case, acknowledged in a telephone interview that the grounds for the court's ruling were "quite exceptional."

The Russian prosecutor's office on Friday declined to comment. Dmitry Peskov, a Kremlin spokesman, said by telephone that "the law enforcement authorities and the judicial authorities are pursuing a single goal: not to allow law-breaking to go unpunished."

After being arrested by Russian special forces in October 2003, Khodorkovsky was convicted of fraud and tax evasion. Russian authorities are now pursuing charges of embezzlement against him and an imprisoned business partner, Platon Lebedev.

At the time of his arrest, Khodorkovsky -- then Russia's richest man -- was seen by many political analysts as a potential threat to Putin because of his support of an opposition party. The Yukos affair became a turning point in Putin's presidency, signaling the vulnerability of the super-rich oligarchs, who wielded huge influence after privatizing large chunks of Russian industry in the 1990s.