SOS in the UN

Former co -owner of Yukos Leonid Nevzlin asks the UN Secretary General Pan Hi Muna to help in the liberation of his former colleagues who are in Russian prisons. According to Jerusalem Post on Monday, he turned to him with an open letter. Copies of the letter are sent to the US Congress, the Supreme Commissar of the UN Human Rights, the Council of Europe and the OSCE parliamentary Assembly.

“More than 40 people were either arrested on fabricated accusations, or forcedly left the country, they are constantly threatened with physical reprisal,” Nevzlin writes. “Yukos employees became hostages of politics deprived of rights, the Russian government puts them in open discrimination.”

The letter was written after the ex-head of the Yukos Mikhail Khodorkovsky in prison announced a hunger strike, demanding to free the former vice president of the company Vasily Aleksanyan. Aleksanyan more AIDS and cancer, but the authorities refused to transfer it from a pre -trial detention center to a specialized clinic for several months, despite the decision of the European Court of Human Rights. “The Kremlin ignored these requirements, because [Aleksanyan] refused to give false testimonies against his Yukos colleagues in exchange for life,” Nevzlin writes. “Only now, after criticism from the West, the court announced that Aleksanyan would provide some medical care.” Not allowing Aleksanyan to receive proper treatment, the Russian authorities "moved to the next stage of the hostage capture: to the killing of hostages," he added.

Nevzlin claims that another convicted employee of Yukos was subjected to torture - Alexei Pichugin. “He was given narcotic and psychotropic drugs,” he writes. “Pichugina was convicted of frankly false accusations and sentenced to life imprisonment simply for refusing to admit guilt and testify against the leadership of“ Yukos ”.

Nevzlin himself escaped his arrest, having left in 2003 in Israel. The Russian authorities twice demanded his extradition, to which the state prosecutor’s office of the country twice refused.