Is Journalism Worth Dying For__ Final Dispatches - Anna Politkovskaya [160]
It was less random in the case of Boris [Berezovsky]. He is a financier, and it is generally acknowledged that we offer the greatest freedom in the world for financial operations. Also, I told Boris, “You are requesting political asylum, which Britain has already granted to Sasha Litvinenko. Your case is directly linked with his. By legal precedent, the Litvinenko case will be aggregated with yours, and he has already received asylum. That means that no other verdict in your case is possible: if they gave him asylum for refusing to kill you, they are quite certain to give it to you, because it was you the Russian state authorities wanted to kill. That is an established fact.”
In other words, it is both coincidence and for good reason that Russians are gathering here. In today’s Europe, out of the members of the European Union (and I emphasise that, because Norway and Switzerland are not members, and they are even more free) Britain is the best country for getting things done. It keeps its distance from the European Union, and there is obviously still a great deal of freedom here.
Do you think that the concentration here of political refugees might seriously impair relations between Britain and Russia, or Europe and Russia?
As far as Britain is concerned, definitely not. Blair will continue to love Putin in spite of Zakayev, purely as a matter of political expediency. No matter how many émigrés accumulate here, Britain never alters its relations with anyone. Such is the tradition. For us in Britain, granting asylum is not a political but a legal decision, no matter what the Soviet – excuse me, Russian – Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Kremlin lot think. Political asylum decisions are taken not by the Government but by the courts. The Government can make only an initial decision and any person has the right to an appeal, which is heard in court. Accordingly, the Government always bears in mind that its decision may be reviewed in court, and tries to second-guess how the courts are likely to rule. That gives a judicial guarantee of protection.
I couldn’t help smiling at the protest by the Russian Minister of Foreign Affairs, Mr Ivanov, over the fact that an English policeman released Zakayev from Heathrow Airport on Friday night. […] It demonstrates how professionally incompetent they are – they just don’t understand how things work here. The English policeman did not ask the Prime Minister what to do about Zakayev. He simply thought it would cause less trouble if, since he had confiscated Zakayev’s passport, he released this person into England. Zakayev couldn’t leave the country anyway, and if the policeman’s superiors wanted to change that decision they could do so tomorrow themselves. In other words, as a policeman on night shift, he was doing nothing that might harm Britain, and that was his main concern. It was his decision, not the British Government’s. By delivering a completely unnecessary broadside at the British Government, Minister Ivanov merely caused offence and made it even less likely that Zakayev would be returned to Russia. Nevertheless, the general European climate is clearly worsening because of the Zakayev affair. The European Parliament’s delegation was not allowed into Chechnya, and this was expressly linked to Zakayev.
Yes, but that has no bearing at all on Britain’s position. On the general European position, yes, in the sense that this is beginning to irritate people in Europe, but what is irritating them is not that the Chechen problem is fundamentally insoluble, but the way Russia is dealing with it. Listen, the European Parliament is an extremely neutral organization. If it is not Orwellian, it is certainly in the mould foreseen by Huxley. Yet it took the initiative of passing a special resolution approving Denmark’s action in