LAWYER IN THE DOCK
by Tony Halpin

The Times (London)
June 21, 2007, Thursday

Karinna Moskalenko’s work in defence of human rights has earned
her Russia’s highest legal award. The 53-year-old cuts a slight and
matronly figure in the face of overwhelming Kremlin might. But it is
to her that Russia’s powerless turn to defend their rights as they
struggle with the regime. Today she will learn whether Vladimir Putin
has wrecked her career as a lawyer.

Now she must depend on other lawyers to rebuff the attempt to have her
disbarred on the surreal grounds that she has been lax in defending
Mikhail Khodorkovsky, the oligarch imprisoned so that the Kremlin
could dismantle his oil company, Yukos.

Moskalenko represents Khodorkovsky at the European Court of Human
Rights in Strasbourg, where she and her team have won 27 cases and
have more than 100 pending against the Russian state. She noted dryly
that her client was now defending his lawyer after Khodorkovsky issued
a statement to the Moscow Bar Association denouncing the attempt to
disbar her.

Moskalenko was born in 1954 to Armenian parents in Baku, Azerbaijan,
also the birthplace of the former chess champion Garry Kasparov, whom
she defends against Kremlin crackdowns in his anti-Putin campaign,
The Other Russia.

Moskalenko graduated in 1977 from the law faculty at Leningrad State
University, where Putin was a year ahead of her. She recalled: "The
faculty was very small and we all knew each other. Now probably he
could also be informed about me."

Her belief in the Soviet system led her to study law so that she
could work as a prosecutor. However, her studies made her realise
that her sympathies lay in defending the rights of the accused. She
completed a specialist course in human rights at Birmingham University
and founded her centre, the International Protection Centre, in 1995.

In 2001 the grandmother of two was the first Russian lawyer to present
a case before the European Court of Human Rights. Russia now has more
cases filed by plaintiffs than any other country, many concerning
allegations of torture in Chechnya.

"My centre has worked for 12 years and people always asked me if the
authorities hindered our work. I always answered ‘no’ and that was
the truth," said Moskalenko. "But something has changed."

The present threat may be professional, but concerns for physical
safety are never far from mind in a country that has experienced a
spate of high-profile killings.

Official pressure on her centre has grown so severe that Moskalenko
has transferred all her case files to Strasbourg to protect them. She
assigns two lawyers to each case in case something happens to one
of them.

"They promised to disbar me once before, in 2005, and I said then
that it was a bad joke. This time they are joking too aggressively,"
she said.