Mikhail Khodorkovsky’s brief but successful hunger strike this week was based upon an unusual request:  he was seeking confirmation that President Dmitry Medvedev was aware that Russian courts are disobeying a law Medvedev himself had recently gotten enacted.

Here’s the background: Dmitry Medvedev has been making lots of noises about the need to reform Russia’s criminal justice system, and recently actually did something about it, pushing through an amendment to the Code of Criminal Procedure that categorically rules out pre-trial detention in Russia’s infamous “investigative isolators” for economic crimes.

So you would think that Mikhail Khodorkovsky would be released when the latest three-month extension of his stay at Moscow’s notorious Matrosskaya Tishina isolator expired this month (well, actually, he still wouldn’t be released, because he’s been denied parole in the eight-year sentence he’s serving after his first show trial, but that’s another story). But you would be wrong. Because there’s an invisible footnote to every article of the Code of Criminal Procedure stating “Does not apply to Mikhail Khodorkovsky”.