Following the jury's decision last week to acquit all defendants in the trial, the OSCE Representative on Freedom of the Media Miklos Haraszti immediately accused Russia of total ineffectiveness in protecting its journalists.
"The Russian Foreign Ministry believes that such a demarche by Mr. Haraszti is obviously of a biased if not provocative nature and damages the reputation not only of the OSCE institution on press freedom, but of the organization as the whole," Andrei Nesterenko said.
The Moscow Military District Court acquitted last Friday three men of involvement in the investigative journalist's murder, one day after the jury unanimously concluded that prosecutors had failed to prove the defendants' guilt.
Following the ruling Haraszti said in his press release that "The Politkovskaya verdict tops the long history of the inability by Russia's authorities to provide safety to embattled journalists. This amounts to practical impunity for the murder and physical assault of those covering corruption and human rights issues."
"There can be no true freedom of the press as long as the brightest journalists across the country fear being killed for doing their job," the OSCE official added.
Nesterenko said it is not the first time that Russia has been subject to groundless criticism by Haraszti.
"It seems that there is nothing left of his [Haraszti's] 'balanced' approach to situations that had been widely popularized by the OSCE. Once again... the organization's representative is, to put it mildly, ignoring the real state of affairs," the high-ranking Russian diplomat said.
Novaya Gazeta reporter Politkovskaya, who gained international recognition for her reports of atrocities against civilians in the troubled Caucasus republic of Chechnya, was gunned down in an elevator in her Moscow apartment building in October 2006, in what police described as a contract killing.
Judge Yevgeny Zubov ruled last week that the case be referred back to the Investigation Committee at the Russian Prosecutor General's Office and said that the verdict could be appealed within a 10-day period.
