From today’s Washington Post:

Defense lawyers and legal experts call the case against Khodorkovsky and Lebedev absurd. Although the men were convicted of tax fraud related to the profits of their oil company, Yukos, they are now charged — in an indictment running more than 3,500 pages — with stealing basically all the oil that Yukos produced over the same period covered by the first trial. The accusations — of thievery and of failing to pay taxes on the allegedly stolen product — amount to double prosecution for the same deed.

“I was extremely surprised,” Sabine Leutheusser-Schnarrenberger, former justice minister of Germany, said to Echo of Moscow radio, “that the new charges are based on the same circumstances.” Leutheusser-Schnarrenberger, who attended the trial’s opening session, examined the first proceeding as the rapporteur of the Council of Europe Parliamentary Assembly and said that she found “many holes in the rule of law.”