European Court of Human Rights Finds Ruling Against Russian Opposition Leader was Arbitrary and Unfair (October 17, 2017) [1]
On October 17, 2017, the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) ruled [3] in Navalnyye v. Russia that a Russian court’s criminal conviction of Aleksey Navalnyy, an opposition leader, and his brother Oleg Navalnyy, an entrepreneur, for fraud and money laundering was arbitrary and unfair because it was based on the unforeseeable application of criminal law. The case concerned an agreement between two companies—Yves Rocher Vostok and Multidisciplinary Processing (MPK)—and Chief Subscription Agency, which was set up by a company that the applicants and their parents had acquired 2007. The Trial Court found that the brothers had committed fraud against MPK and Yves Rocher Vostok and had laundered the proceeds of illegal transactions. According to the press release [4], the ECtHR found that the Russian court “had extensively and unforeseeably construed to their detriment the offence of commercial fraud under the Russian Criminal Code. It had therefore not been foreseeable that the applicants’ commercial conduct would constitute fraud or commercial fraud. Consequently, it had been equally unforeseeable that the profits derived from their commercial activities would constitute the proceeds of crime whose use could amount to money laundering.”