Khodorkovsky listed number two powerful prisoner

American The Foreign Policy magazine has issued the list of the World’s Most Powerful Prisoners with Chinese richest person, Huang Guangyu, on the top. Huang was sentenced to 14 years in prison on charges of bribery and insider trading. 

Russian oil tycoon and most important political dissident, Mikhail Khodorkovsky was named as the second most powerful prisoner in the world.

The publication comments that Mikhail Khodorkovsky has emerged as Prime Minister Vladimir Putin's most persistent and trenchant domestic critic. Supporters say the real reason Khodorkovsky was imprisoned is that then-President Vladimir Putin was threatened by his increasing political ambitions.

The magazine notes that since his arrest, Khodorkovsky, who has been held in a Siberian prison camp as well as a number of detention centers in Moscow, has taken every available opportunity to assail the current leaders in the Kremlin, granting interviews to journalists, penning op-eds in Western newspapers, and cross-examining powerful officials during his ongoing corruption trials.

Foreign Policy Magazine remarks that for President Dmitry Medvedev, who has sought to project an image of pro-business reform, Khodorkovsky is a continual embarrassment.

Khodorkovsky is due to be released in October 2011, just five months before Russia's next presidential election, though new charges have been brought against him. The publication concludes that it seems unlikely that he will be allowed to go free as long as Putin, who is said to despise him personally, is still in power.

Omar Abdel-Rahman is the third most powerful prisoner, according to the magazine. A prominent jihadist leader in Egypt during the 1980s, Abdel-Rahman immigrated to the United States in 1990 and was convicted five years later for his role in planning the first World Trade Center bombing. He is currently serving a life sentence at the Butner Federal Correctional Complex in North Carolina.

Number four is Marwan Barghouti, who joined the Palestinian Fatah movement at age 15 and emerged as a prominent figure in the party's "young guard," which gained power in the Palestinian territories while more established figures like Yasir Arafat and current President Mahmoud Abbas were in exile.

And the fifth most powerful prisoner is Aung San Suu Kyi, who is described as possibly the most internationally prominent imprisoned dissident since Nelson Mandela left Robben Island. Aung San Suu Kyi won Burma's 1989 presidential election, but the result was thrown out by the country's ruling military junta, which placed her under house arrest. She was awarded with the Nobel Peace Prize in absentia two years later.