Secret trial a denial of justice

Moscow’s announcement that Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich will face trial on espionage charges behind closed doors on June 26 shows the true state of what is claimed to be justice in Vladimir Putin’s dictatorship. Gershkovich, 32, has been incarcerated in Moscow’s infamous Lefortovo Prison since March last year.

It once housed Alexander Solzhenitsyn, and Joseph Stalin’s secret police executed countless victims there in the 1930s.

Russian claims that Gershkovich was “caught red-handed” collecting information for the CIA on a Russian tank factory are palpably absurd. The Biden administration has dismissed them as having “zero credibility”.

Yet they could potentially imprison Gershkovich in a Putin gulag for 20 years. As the Journal’s editor-in-chief Emma Tucker said, Gershkovich was facing a false and baseless charge.

Russia’s move towards a sham trial was expected, deeply disappointing and outrageous. “Evan has spent 441 days wrongfully detained in a Russian prison for simply doing his job,” Tucker said. The case was an assault on free press. It also is emblematic of much that is rotten about Mr Putin’s oppressive regime as it continues its entirely lawless and inhumane assault on Ukraine.

Gershkovich, a US citizen and the first Western reporter to be put on trial since the end of the Soviet era, is no spy. He is a widely respected, diligent reporter for one of the world’s great newspapers. He is being targeted by the jackbooted injustice Mr Putin uses to silence critics. Secret trials, away from scrutiny, are a mainstay of the rule of tyrants.

As Tucker says, the Biden administration must “redouble efforts to get Evan released”. So must the rest of the free world that values press freedom exposing Mr Putin’s tyranny and contempt for the most basic human rights.