MOSCOW. Sept 26 (Interfax) - Two Russian public figures have condemned a conclusion by the Prosecutor General's Office on Wednesday that Tsar Nicholas II and his family, executed by the Bolsheviks, do not qualify for political rehabilitation under Russian law.

The Prosecutor General's Office argued that the law only permits rehabilitating victims of rulings by law courts or other bodies "vested with judicial functions" and that the last Russian monarch and his family cannot be rehabilitated as they were put to death in 1918 by an executive governmental body.

"If peasants and victims of deportation get rehabilitated here, I can't see what the problem is with Nicholas II," the chief executive of Russian human rights group Memorial, Arseny Roginsky, told Interfax.

The order to execute the Romanov royal family was "a decision on persecution that was passed by the Bolshevik supreme body of government in Yekaterinburg," Roginsky said.

"The imperial family must be rehabilitated. There are reasons for this. But the Prosecutor General's Office says that was not a judicial body and a non-judicial decision and that they don't have enough documents. This is formalism pure and simple," he said.

Edvard Radzinsky, a well-known Russian dramatist and historian, argued that Russia needed to rehabilitate the Romanovs.

"It's not the Romanovs who need this - it doesn't matter to them. It's those who are alive. The Romanovs were not victims of a judicial error. Nor were they victims of gangsters. They were victims of a new government, which shot them under its new laws," Radzinsky told Interfax.

"A court in the country that is (legal) successor to the country whose name was the USSR must decide whether their execution was a correct measure or that it was an act of political persecution. It was actually an act of political persecution against the tsar, his family, their doctor and their servants," Radzinsky said.