13th anniversary of the Lembergs trial

Today marks 13 years since the first court hearing in the case commonly known as the Lembergs case, but officially as a criminal case with two numbers - No 12812001408, No 12812001608.

As is known, the first instance proceedings in this case were concluded a year ago. The judgment of the court of first instance was appealed, and in February this year two hearings have already taken place at the appeal level. Three times this year, the proceedings have been postponed due to the incapacity of the judges.

Preparation of the appeal

The thirteenth year of this trial has undoubtedly been very intense and demanded a great deal of energy from the parties.

After the reading of the summary judgment on February 22, the reasoned judgment took four months to write and was given to the parties on June 22. The full text of the judgment was indeed voluminous, running to 1920 pages. This judgment had to be appealed within 20 days, which it was - almost all the parties appealed, including the victims (except the millionaires Valentīns Kokalis and Vladimirs Krastiņš); the prosecutor lodged an appeal protest.

The course of the proceedings shows that difficulties have been caused by the composition of the Court of Appeal in the same Riga Regional Court where the Lembergs case was heard at first instance. First, Sandra Amola was appointed judge, and accordingly became the chairperson of the Criminal Cases Chamber for this case. Amola then appointed the full court, including Judges Signe Kalniņa and Lauma Šteinerte.

When this panel decided that the case would be heard orally rather than in writing, the chairperson of the Riga Regional Court, Daiga Vilsone, changed the composition of the panel, reassigning Šteinerte as a reserve judge. In her place, Judge Valdis Vazdiķis, who had been officially designated in the case allocation plan to hear only civil cases, was added to the Criminal Cases Chamber.

There is no doubt that the last few months have not been easy for the judges appointed, as they not only have to familiarize themselves with eight appeals, running into many hundreds of pages, and the prosecutor's appeal protest, but also, as far as possible, with the case file.

The size of the case is evidenced by the fact that the number of volumes of the criminal case has increased to 328 (there were "only" 154 volumes at first instance).

The litigation avalanche

However, these are not the only developments in the past year of litigation that are closely linked to the Lembergs case. Aivars Lembergs has lodged three complaints with the Constitutional Court related to the proceedings described here. Of these, one has basically already been resolved, as the Cabinet of Ministers, recognizing the validity of Lembergs' complaint, has reacted with lightning speed by promoting amendments to the law which will guarantee the right to vote in municipal elections to all prisoners. The draft law has already started its progress in the Saeima and the Constitutional Court will be able to take into account the promptness of the legislators in remedying the injustice when deciding on this Lembergs' complaint in March.

Aivars Lembergs has also filed a lawsuit against the State Security Service (SSS) in the administrative court, demanding that Lembergs' influence on SSS officials be eliminated and that Lembergs be provided with a statement that this influence has been eliminated.

To an outsider, such a demand may seem strange, but what is a man to do who is put in prison by a court claiming, without evidence, that he can use this influence on special services officials to avoid a court sentence? How else can one defend oneself against such allegations when one does not even know who the influenced officials are; when one does not know why the special services would allow the illegal behavior of these influenced officials?

Lembergs has also submitted material claims for compensation to several state institutions. For example, a claim for compensation for the damage caused by the refusal to provide the necessary booster shot in prison conditions (for a person who hears government representatives urging vaccination on a daily basis, this may seem unbelievable!), which led to Lembergs becoming seriously ill with Covid.

It can be predicted that if compensation for these damages is refused, new legal actions against the relevant public authorities will follow.

As is well known, Lembergs' fight for the right to adequate health care, as well as his fight against the unjustified detention order, continued throughout the previous year.

When did the Lembergs case start?

With the case now before the Court of Appeal, the question arises: when exactly did the Lembergs case start?

The prosecution and the defense have different views on this, while the appellate judges may not yet know all the events over several decades that are linked to the Lembergs case.

But establishing a start date for the Lembergs case is very important in order to determine whether the "reasonable time limits" for criminal proceedings have been respected in this case.

Of course, a criminal trial that has been going on for 13 years would hardly seem "reasonable" to a reasonable person.

However, in the Lembergs case, we are not even talking about 13 years of criminal proceedings. 13 years have only elapsed since February 16, 2009, when the first court hearing took place in this case. Even the trial phase of this criminal case has already lasted 13.5 years since the case was brought before the court in August 2008. Initially, the case was like a ball in a game of football between the Riga and Kurzeme Regional Courts, until the case ended up before Judge Boris Geimans of the Riga Regional Court.

But the criminal proceedings in this case were officially opened on October 3, 2005 - more than 16 years ago.

However, even October 3, 2005, cannot be considered as the beginning of the Lembergs case, as in the case-law of the European Court of Human Rights, the beginning of criminal proceedings starts from "an official notification by a competent State authority alleging that a person has committed a criminal offence" (Lavents v. Latvia).

Here it is also appropriate to recall the words of the chairperson of the Riga Regional Court, Daiga Vilsone: "According to the case-law of the European Court of Human Rights, in criminal cases the time limit for the examination of a case is calculated not from the moment the case is brought before the court, but from the investigation stage of the pre-trial criminal proceedings. According to the case-law of the European Court of Human Rights, the clock starts ticking when the competent authorities notify a person that he is suspected of having committed a criminal offence."

Accordingly, all that is needed is to determine when a "competent authority" notified Lembergs that he was a suspect.

Reasonable or unreasonable?

So. On May 20, 1999, the Prosecutor General, Jānis Skrastiņš, initiated a test case for the same alleged offences for which Lembergs was convicted by a court of first instance on February 22, 2021.

Prosecutor General Skrastiņš initiated the test case on the application of Ainārs Šlesers, who was still a novice politician at the time. Anyone who actively followed Latvian politics back in 1999 will remember the huge public battles between Ainārs Šlesers and Aivars Lembergs on the political stage, as well as the huge battles between Andris Šķēle and Aivars Lembergs, one of the elements of which was the above-mentioned submission by Šlesers to the Prosecutor General. There was a great deal written about it in the Latvian media at the time; Latvian politics in those years largely revolved around this axis of the Šķēle-Lembergs conflict.

The test case initiated by Skrastiņš was the subject of procedural steps, and Lembergs gave written explanations, so that he had clearly been notified by a "competent authority" that he was under suspicion already in the summer of 1999 (more than 22 years ago!).

The investigation initiated by Prosecutor General Skrastiņš was closed a year later, as no criminal offence had been established. However, the materials (at least some of them) of this test case are also part of the materials of the criminal case currently pending before the Riga Regional Court and were used as evidence. Nothing is forgotten, no one is forgotten.

But the test case, which was closed in 2000, was reopened by Prosecutor General Jānis Maizītis in the summer of 2003 after a petition by Arnolds Laksa, an influential member of Latvia's First Party (Latvijas Pirmā partija) led by politician Ainārs Šlesers. Arnolds Laksa was a business partner of Ainārs Gulbis (who is known as Latvia's first millionaire and oligarch); he also had quite sharp public conflicts with Lembergs - first about the privatization of Latvijas Krājbanka, then about political issues.

In 2003, as part of the renewed test case, the Prosecutor General's Office sent requests for legal assistance to Switzerland, already alleging that Lembergs had committed criminal offences. These requests for legal assistance were leaked to the press, so that not only Lembergs himself, but everyone in Latvia was informed that Lembergs was "suspected" of committing criminal offences.

On October 3, 2005, the test case initiated in the summer of 2003 had already become a criminal case, as the Criminal Procedure Code had expired and the new Criminal Procedure Law had entered into force, which no longer contained "test cases" - if there were any suspicions, criminal proceedings were initiated immediately, while the old test cases were renamed criminal cases.

In other words, there is clear evidence, including publicly known evidence described in numerous publications, that the Lembergs case started on May 20, 1999.

But whether the time limits for criminal proceedings against a person, which have been ongoing for more than 22 years, are reasonable or unreasonable is for the reader to judge.