President Dmitry Medvedev signalled on Wednesday that he may pardon more convicts than his predecessor, Vladimir Putin, who all but ended the practice during his eight-year term.
Putin abolished a presidential pardon commission early in his presidency and pardoned far fewer prisoners than his predecessor, Boris Yeltsin.
Without mentioning either former leader, Medvedev said the provincial commissions now responsible for recommending candidates for pardon should seek a middle ground.
"Jumping between extremes is unacceptable," he told officials during a meeting on efforts to improve Russia's prisons and corrections policies.
"A situation in which these commissions propose packs of individuals who make this request to the authorities is unacceptable, but so is the opposite, when the commissions don't propose anyone at all to be pardoned," Medvedev said in televised remarks. "There should be a reasonable state line here."
While Medvedev stressed the need for moderation, the number of pardons can only rise after its sharp decline under Putin. According to Ekho Moskvy radio, more than 70,000 people were pardoned over nine years by recommendation of the commission Putin abolished in 2001, but the figure dropped to 42 in 2005, nine in 2006 and none in 2007 - the last full year of Putin's presidency.
Putin "made it clearly understood that nobody should be pardoned" unless the initiative comes from the Kremlin itself, said Yury Shmidt, a defense lawyer who has represented imprisoned former oil tycoon Mikhail Khodorkovsky.
Khodorkovsky's politically-charged trial was seen as part of a Kremlin campaign to quash potential challenges to Putin's power.
A lawyer, Medvedev has made improving Russia's badly troubled justice system a goal of his presidency. He owes his position to Putin and has pledged to continue his mentor's course, but his accent on the rule of law has raised hope for change among Russia's beleaguered human rights and democracy advocates.
However, Medvedev has yet to give any sign of a significant break from the policies of Putin, who is his prime minister and is widely seen as holding more real power.
Medvedev did not yield to a petition campaign urging a pardon for Svetlana Bakhmina, a former lawyer at Khodorkovsky's oil company, Yukos. Bakhmina, who is serving a 6 1/2-year prison term for embezzlement and tax evasion, gave birth in November to her third child. Now provincial commissions submit the names of candidates to governors, who decide whether to pass them on to the president
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