On May 19, 2013, Russia’s Supreme Court announced on its website that it would hear an appeal against the second conviction of Mikhail Khodorkovsky and Platon Lebedev. The announcement did not specify on what date the hearing would take place, or which part of the December 2010 verdict would be under review.

Khodorkovsky’s defence lawyer, Vadim Klyuvgant, told the Interfax news agency: “This means that the appeal will be reviewed at a special session of the judicial board. If they follow the law, the judicial board has no choice but to let Khodorkovsky and Lebedev free.”

If the history of the proceedings against Khodorkovsky and Lebedev over the past decade is any guide, however, the announcement from the Supreme Court should not raise hopes that they will have a fair hearing.

Since the end of the second Khodorkovsky-Lebedev trial, a relentlessly absurd saga of appeals has unfolded. Proceedings have been repeatedly unlawfully delayed, or stymied by groundless rulings. After two years of obstruction and delays, a supervisory appeal hearing finally took place at the Moscow City Court on December 20, 2012. Despite the enormous weight of legal and factual arguments undermining it, the appeal judges confirmed the December 2010 guilty verdict. Incredibly, the ruling lacked any thorough judicial analysis of the appellants’ arguments.

Khodorkovsky’s defence team filed the current appeal on February 4, 2013. It had previously filed an appeal nearly one year earlier, to no avail. In a statement in February, Klyuvgant described the year in between as: “A year of judicial red tape, run-arounds, tricks and direct lies. A year lost for movement toward fairness and justice, toward preservation of what’s left of the trust in courts. The most terrible thing is that it was yet another, already the ninth, year of imprisonment of the people convicted without guilt under a phony verdict.”

Even though Khodorkovsky and Lebedev are scheduled to be released in 2014, there is no certainty that this will in fact occur. As stated by Amnesty International when designating Khodorkovsky and Lebedev “prisoners of conscience” in May 2011, the two men “have been trapped in a judicial vortex that answers to political not legal considerations” in courts “unable, or unwilling, to deliver justice in their cases.”