By then Sergei Mishketkul and Georgi Georgobiane were well aware that they had become the victims of a police scheme, backed by corrupt judges, to improve poor crime detection rates.

The students were convicted of burgling a Moscow flat in a trial so obviously rigged that even the victim insisted that they were innocent. Tatyana Turuntayeva said that she was burgled twice more after the men had been detained and is now helping their lawyer to take their case to the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg.

Yesterday the Government introduced a new legal code designed to protect the rights of ordinary Russians against such excesses, and to move Russia one step further from its repressive Soviet past. The new code will replace the one written in 1960, when Nikita Khrushchev ruled the Soviet Union and the police and courts served the State.

Under the old system, the defendant is presumed guilty almost from the moment of arrest and the conviction rate is more than 90 per cent. Those convicted, often on the basis of confessions extracted by torture, are likely to serve their sentences in a Siberian labour camp or an overcrowded Moscow prison. The collapse of Communism has led to underpaid judges and police investigators taking even more bribes.

The new legal code, which will be difficult to implement, will be phased in. It is intended to introduce some of the most basic concepts integral to Western law. Under the new code, suspects will be presumed innocent until proved guilty. They will be entitled to immediate access to lawyers and must appear in court within 48 hours. All serious criminal cases will be tried before a jury.

Judges, who have previously been expected to back the police, will act as independent arbiters. Defence lawyers will be permitted to challenge the admissibility of evidence and prosecutors will lose many of their formidable powers, including to authorise arrests.

The code also recommends forms of punishment other than imprisonment. Russia has the world’s largest per capita prison population, with more than a million held in prisons and penal colonies.

The new legal code is an attempt to show that President Putin’s much-hyped “dictatorship of law” is more than a slogan. Mr Putin considers it to be a key step towards Russia’s acceptance by the West as a responsible and worthy partner.

The newspaper Izvestia said: “The goal of this reform is finally to rid ourselves of the atavistic Soviet juridical machine and maximally approach Western-standard legal procedure.” Critics said that the new code would require huge resources for retraining and would face fierce resistance from those whose interests it threatened, but most observers agreed that Russia’s courts, which work efficiently for Kremlin-backed causes and slowly for the less powerful, must be improved.

Harsh regime

* Cells designed for eight can be packed with up to 30 inmates, who sleep in shifts

* A quarter of the prison population is waiting to be tried, which can take years

* About 10 per cent of the prison population has an infectious form of TB

* Prison conditions are appalling, in buildings most of which were built between the 17th and 19th centuries

* Attempts to educate or rehabilitate are minimal and discipline is harsh