No statute of limitations

Well-known dissident and opposition politician Vladimir Bukovsky demanded that the British authorities arrest former USSR President Mikhail Gorbachev, who is now in London. Gorbachev is celebrating his 80th birthday in the British capital; on March 30, a ceremony was held there to present the “Man Who Changed the World” award he founded, which was received by CNN founder Ted Turner, Kenyan engineer Evans Wadongo and British scientist Sir Timothy John Berners-Lee.

Bukovsky accuses Gorbachev of crimes against humanity committed in the late 1980s and early 1990s in Tbilisi, Baku and Vilnius, where protests by civilians were brutally suppressed. After the suppression of a rally in Tbilisi on the night of April 8-9, 1989, 19 people died. In Baku, on the night of January 19-20, 1990, more than 130 people, including women and children, were killed. As a result of the assault on the Vilnius television center on the night of January 12–13, 1991, 14 people were killed.

Bukovsky made an application to the Magistrates' Court, but Judge Daphne Wickham refused to issue a warrant for Gorbachev's arrest. Bukovsky’s statement, published on the blog of the first deputy editor-in-chief of Echo of Moscow Vladimir Varfolomeev, in particular, says that this decision “is very regrettable, since it not only denies justice to the victims of communist terror, but also disgraces one of Her Majesty’s courts with vicious practices "telephone law" in the Soviet style. The decision was indeed made behind closed doors, so that my legal representative was not heard, and on the basis of secret negotiations with the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, which are mentioned in the resolution.”

Bukovsky reports that Judge Wickham "of her own arbitrariness" "awarded" Gorbachev diplomatic immunity on the grounds that he was in the UK as a representative of "a special mission on behalf of the Russian state, which involves a meeting with the Prime Minister." The judge, according to Bukovsky, admitted that she would never have issued an arrest warrant for Gorbachev without the consent of Moscow, but did not consider the latter necessary. Bukovsky notes with bewilderment that Gorbachev does not hold any official position in Russia and nowhere in the media was it noted that his visit to the United Kingdom was part of any "special mission" on behalf of the Kremlin, nor that Gorbachev was planning meet with the Prime Minister. If this is so, Bukovsky writes, “the Prime Minister and the Foreign Office must provide an explanation to parliament and voters.” He recalled that the current government had previously promised a tough policy towards the Russian regime.

Bukovsky plans to appeal Judge Wickham's decision. “Until the rule of law in this country is completely supplanted by the law of the telephone, we will fight as many legal battles as necessary to try to bring justice to the victims of the communist regime's mass murders.”