N.P.: If you do a Google search on “Pavel Ivlev,” you’ll get a link to the Interpol website, where you are listed as wanted in connection for “money laundering.” Why can’t Interpol find you, even though you are legitimately residing in the U.S.?
P.I.: Interpol itself doesn't search for anybody — it is only a database saved on a large bureaucratic computer located in the French city of Lyon. Whenever some country’s officials ask Interpol to upload information about someone on its website, Interpol publishes the information, that’s all. There are 25 of us there — 25 people posted there for the YUKOS case. Then each separate country decides for itself whether to search for the accused or not. And the Americans did in fact decide for themselves — they granted me U.S. citizenship.
From the Interpol website.
N.P.: From a lawyer’s perspective, what is the Russian system in need of the most right now?
P.I.: First and foremost, we have to get rid of the prosecutor’s office. It has to be reformed because it is impossible for it to continue existing in its present state. Secondly, we have to conduct a lustration and make the data on all FSB (Federal Security Service) employees and those who cooperated with them, public. Yes, to do this you’d need a lot of digging around in archives, which is lengthy and costly, but on the other hand, it is imperative because all those people are continuing the genocide of their own people. Today’s Russia is not a police state, but a gangster one, a state under the protection of the FSB and a cluster of comrades spit on the people and simultaneously build palaces for themselves. Besides that, we need to get rid of a minimum of half of the judges’ corps and appoint or elect new ones, independent and unsullied ones. That is, we need to do what was done in other Eastern European countries.
N.P.: Do you come up with some positive ideas, too? Or just with the ones that dismiss and prohibit?
P.I.: Power needs to be decentralized and transferred to the regions. This will break the current system of vertical power, which doesn’t work anyway. Governors’ elections need to be brought back. Elections in general need to be brought back, as much as possible. Russia is a country of such vast proportions that it cannot be effectively governed in a centralized manner. Russia needs a decentralization of power like we need air, or the country will fall apart.
N.P.: One last question: If Putin were to be put on trial tomorrow, what would you charge him with?
P.I.: A lot. Anywhere you look, there are crimes: the mass killings of peaceful Chechen inhabitants without any trial or investigation during the course of the Second Chechen War, for example… In any case, Putin must definitely be tried by a jury. If I were to prosecute him, I would ask for a life sentence.
