The Wall Street Journal reports more details on the saga of Garry Kasparov's lawyer, now facing persecution from the Kremlin for daring to represent her client:

Karinna Moskalenko is Russia's most distinguished human-rights lawyer. Vladimir Putin wants her disbarred.

Ms. Moskalenko, 53, is the founder of the Moscow-based International Protection Center. For more than a decade, she has been arguing cases before the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg, France, to whose judgments Russia has been legally bound ever since it incorporated the European Convention on Human Rights in its 1993 Constitution. "We started with dozens of cases," she says, recalling the IPC's earliest days during the Yeltsin era. "We are now dealing with hundreds of cases."

Today, her clients include the imprisoned former Yukos CEO Mikhail Khodorkovsky, chess champion and opposition leader Garry Kasparov and the family of murdered journalist Anna Politkovskaya. She also represents the victims of the 2002 "Nord-Ost" Moscow theater hostage crisis, and the relatives of Chechen civilians who have been tortured, murdered or disappeared in Russian "counterterrorism" operations.

With its minuscule staff of eight lawyers and 20 trainees, the IPC receives roughly 12,000 requests for representation a year, though most lack adequate documentation to be brought to trial. Still, her current caseload in Strasbourg, totaling about 180, represents the lion's share of the court's docket, and she knows how to get results: Her victory in the 2002 Kalashnikov case--involving a man who had been held in pre-trial detention for five years in cramped and disease-ridden conditions--forced the Russian government to embark on its first serious attempt at modernizing its prison system.

Such work has earned Ms. Moskalenko no shortage of formal tributes outside of Russia. In 2003 she was elected to the International Commission of Jurists; in 2006 she won the International Helsinki Federation's Human Rights Recognition Award. Within Russia it's a different story. Mr. Putin's government assault on the IPC began by questioning the validity of its original registration. Next it proceeded to a tax audit--a favorite Putin tactic against financially strapped human-rights NGOs--on the theory that the IPC had used funds from the National Endowment for Democracy and the Ford and MacArthur Foundations for profit-taking. Though the government's claims were easily disproven, it refuses formally to close the case.

But for sheer chutzpah nothing approaches the government's attempts to disbar Ms. Moskalenko on the grounds that she has incompetently represented Mr. Khodorkovsky--a remarkable bit of solicitude for a man whose sentence to a Siberian prison camp has just been extended. According to a motion filed April 18 by the prosecutor general's office with the Russian registration service, Ms. Moskalenko failed her client in February when she was forced to leave a lawyers' conference with Mr. Khodorkovsky a day early to attend to her sick 14-year-old son. "This [motion] has been decided at a high level, though we don't know who exactly ordered it," says Ms. Moskalenko. Prosecutor General Yuri Chaika was until last year Mr. Putin's minister of justice.