Is the arrest and detention of Mikhail Khodorkovsky in Russia abhorrent to common sense, rule of law and any standard of decency?

There is so much in the criminal system and in the civil system when it comes to politically sensitive cases which take you back to some of the worst days, even to some extent to Stalin. The Khodorkovsky trial was a classic show trial. A show trial defines itself in a number of ways. One of which is that it has absolutely very little to do with he reality of law and everything to do with the appearance of law. It is in fact the fiatrics of show trial that are incredibly important. The appearance of a court, the legitimizing nature of an adversarial system, is something that seemed to be lacking and thus unjust in the Khodorkovsky case. What also seemed to be unjust unfortunately was the scenario whereby Mikhail B. Khodorkovsky was taken to court everyday as if he was the brother of Osama Bin laden, literally in chains, with special troops bringing him strapped….his jeans soaked in urine because he had been kept without facilities for hours and hours, having missed breakfast and eventually also been brought back too late to have dinner. He was brought into court, put into a cage, sat into a bench which was 5 inches wide and uncomfortably made to seat there through the entire day of absolutely surreal proceedings. And then at the end of the day, and this was everyday, the photographers would come in at the 11th hour to take his picture, in attempt to break him. And I don’t know if you people saw the emblematic photo of him smiling through the cage in the internet, but it was an incredible measure of the man, that through this whole period he never broke. When they made his father who was an elderly gentleman, a lovely gentleman, a man who had dedicated himself after working under 40 years of a factory to build an Orphanage, when they made his father on Russian television appear to be involved in a murder, attempting to sell to the public on the idea that the father was a criminal such as the son, it was the only time that he showed the hint of emotion as he attempted to communicate something to his father. So the trial, when you are talking about this kind of “show trial” the message to everyone was that if we can get Khodorkovsky, we can get anyone. The intent was not to anyway demonstrate due process, just the reverse, the intent was to demonstrate the impunity of the power. And to develop that impunity Khodorkovsky had to be taken down. He was in Puttins’ mind an alternative centre, a magnet around which opposition could congeal. Remember the timing of his arrest, just before the elections.