#5 - JRL 2006-184 - JRL Home
Moscow Times
August 15, 2006
Mayoral Elections Backed in Chamber
By Nabi Abdullaev
Staff Writer

A senior Public Chamber official is lashing out at Kremlin-backed efforts to eliminate mayoral elections, saying that would violate the Constitution and squash development of a free society.

In a draft of his report on Russian political life, Vyacheslav Glazychev, head of the chamber's panel on self-government, takes aim at talk of letting regional bosses appoint mayors and bemoans the continuing loss of local power.

Kremlin officials and loyal State Duma lieutenants have long discussed extending the so-called power vertical to the municipal level, which would eliminate one of the last remaining vestiges of self-government in the country.

A law that went into effect earlier this year takes away significant power from local governments to shape their own economic future.

In his report, Glazychev analyzes the law's effects in 46 regions, noting governors have used regional legislatures to strip localities of their town status.

Without town status, communities have no power over their budgets. The report proposes that towns be permitted to decide their own status. Roughly half of the country's regions are allowed to postpone implementation of the law until 2009.

Excerpts of Glazychev's report appeared Monday in Kommersant. The full report will be reviewed by the Public Chamber at a Sept. 30 plenary session.

In the report, Glazychev, an architect and publisher, cites the Constitution to argue for free elections of mayors.

While federal authorities and governors have argued that free mayoral elections often lead to crooked or incompetent local leaders, the Constitution nonetheless calls on the people to elect their own local representatives and should not be violated in the name of efficacy, Glazychev writes. Efforts targeting mayoral elections, he adds, "carry a genuine threat for the country's development." Glazychev could not be reached for comment Monday.

Sergei Miroshnikov, head of the Ministry of Regional Development's department for federal relations and local self-government, dismissed Glazychev's report. "There was an attempt at municipal reform based on democratic principles in 1995, and it failed to divide powers between local and non-local authorities," he said.

Vladimir Rimsky, an Indem think tank analyst, and Ilya Trunin of the Institute of Economy in Transition, said sapping localities of their power undermines the development of a free society.

Alluding to the elimination of gubernatorial elections last year, Trunin observed that municipal government is "the only level of government where citizens can still participate directly."

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#12

Khodorkovskiy Drops Request for Academic Work in Prison

CHITA. Aug 14 (Interfax) - Former Yukos CEO Mikhail Khodorkovsky has given up earlier plans to do research in prison, Khodorkovsky's defense lawyer Natalya Terekhova told Interfax on Monday.

"Mikhail Khodorkovsky no longer plans to do scientific work in prison," the lawyer said.

Terekhova said her client is a packer of ready-made products in the prison's production facility. He is getting along well with other inmates and has good relations with the prison authorities - relations normal for prisoners and prison authorities, she said.

Terekhova also announced that defense lawyer Yury Shmidt continues working on a plea filed with the Supreme Court and demanding that Paragraph 15 of the rules regulating the daily regime in prisons be qualified as violating current legislation.

Defense lawyers argued that Khodorkovsky had been illegally sent into a punishment cell for ten days for receiving what prison authorities called unreported foodstuffs: a food parcel from his relatives. All parcels go through controls at prisons, the lawyers said.