Law Society Event, A few words from me…

Dana Johnson Blog

I went to the Sergei Magnitsky evening at the Law Society, 113 Chancery Lane, London on 26 May 2011. I wasn’t prepared for the impact of the screening of the hour-long Justice for Sergei that was filmed especially for the first anniversary of his death in prison on 16 November 2010. The movie made a strong point that Sergei could have escaped and he conscientiously didn’t make that choice. Until the last moment he believed in justice and rule of law, and he also believed that his duty as a lawyer was to document injustice and bring it to the attention of those in charge. That stated with his discovery of $230 million VAT tax reimbursement fraud and ended with the complaints about prison conditions that affected him and his fellow inmates among whom he often was the only one who could legibly complain and wasn’t afraid to do so despite the reality each complaint was followed by a deterioration of his conditions.

I thought that, after reading papers, online interviews and evidence submitted by REDRESS to the UN Special Rapporteur on Torture, I knew the story very well. After the screening, I couldn’t touch any part of the Magnitsky event in my mind and possibly write about it.

When I feel down, Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin always does miracles for me. This time, too, I opened a random page of Eugene Onegin. It was verse introducing Vladimir Lensky – Pushkin’s young poet who dies prematurely, victim of his naive idealism (tr. Ch. Johnston):

… and he believed his friends were ready
to put on chains for him, and steady
their hand to grapple slander’s cup,
in his defence, and smash it up;

So this became a valid part of the answer for why William Browder, his Hermitage team and Firestone Duncan team won’t give up. William Browder , a tireless Russian corporate governance crusader, answered this question a thousand times, of course, without showing the slightest fatigue, simply by saying ‘they murdered my lawyer’, naming Investigator Silchenko, Pavel Karpov, Artem Kuznetzov and Judge Stashina as the main perpetrators among another 60 officials of Ministry of Interior and penitentiary listed by Moscow Helsinki Group (for Human Rights) as complicit in Sergei’s death.

In Justice for Sergei, Sergei’s aunt remembered her astonishment that at the age of 10 he read Dante’s Inferno at that time she herself hadn’t yet read it. At that age, Sergei must have been impressed with the nine circles of hell deep enough to affect his adult life. If only he read Purgatorio and Paradiso of the Alighieri’ Divine Comedy. Could the tragedy be avoided? But there were no mention of it; Sergei died at the age of 37, Dante’s character is 35 year old. The nine circles of hell are the everyday business of Russia’s penitentiaries for thousands and thousands of people and their relatives and nobody (apart from few human rights defenders inside Russia) is bothered to know about and it would continue to be so unless Sergei Magnitsky didn’t choose to go through it himself.

At discussion time, William Broader shared the progress of the actions they are making to bring some justice for Sergei. The Hermitage team are fighting for implementing visa bans introduced by parliamentary legislation of the USA and EU (hoping for Canada and the UK to follow the suit) for the named 60 officials. The Hermitage team investigated the financial activities of the main perpetrators and traced down their enormous spending habits connected to bank accounts in Switzerland, that are frozen by the authorities there. They discovered the Dubai luxury apartments purchased by judge Stashina and other senior officials implicated in Sergei’s alleged torture and death in prison.

Professor Bill Bowring, a barrister and specialist on Russia, was another panellist answering questions. He characterized Russia’s autocracy as a prehistoric monster that slowly and steadily slumps (moves) it’s gigantic feet ready to stamp to oblivion anything/anyone under, nevertheless if one is quick enough she can sort of escape out of its way.

When the question arose about Putin’s involvement if any in the Sergei Magnitsky events, Professor Bowring gave a characteristic of Putin (‘being a KGB officer installed by Boris Berezovsky, Sobchak, Pilzner and others to protect Yeltsin’s retirement’) as person who has no respect for human life by quoting his numerous neglectful remarks about deaths of people on the Kursk submarine, and the murders of Anna Politkovskaya and Natalia Estemirova. He concluded that Putin just didn’t care, and in the present state of affairs, most probably, has no control over the Ministry of Interior, that is by and large large a ‘feeding ground for bureaucracy’.

To understand ‘why father figures rule mother Russia’ as Orlando Figes wrote in Sunday Times Culture, I recommend reading BBC’s Martin Sixsmith’ RUSSIA A 1,000-Year Chronicle of the Wild East. To me, Putin’s popularity rating figure is not far from Stalin’s. Putin’s predatory hunt after oligarchs is a replica of Stalin’s prosecution of New Economic Policy’s Men – class of rich businessmen, created by his predecessor Lenin.

Understandably at the Sergei Magnistky evening, no one asked if his relatives and William Browder’s people as their legal representatives tried to go through Russian legal avenues for redress. The spread of the corruption is such that it sounds laughable to try to go to court. European Court of Human Rights didn’t sound as a valid vehicle for justice either. In the mood of the event, it wasn’t worth while bringing up universal jurisdiction with the latest victories against a Tunisian torturer in the French Court, and couple of examples in UK courts, one being of an Afghan war lord prosecuted in the UK for torture in Afghanistan. The advantages for devoted people like William Broader with the ability to pay for a legal process are few: there is no need to exhaust domestic remedies in Russia and it is the only possible avenue to bring perpetrators to face criminal charges caught in the middle of their spending trips abroad most European Countries are parties to the Convention against Torture and do practice application of the universal extraterritorial jurisdiction.

Another question was that probably the Russian people ought to be the main power against the regime, which doesn’t care about the plight of little people. Is there any hope for democratic process in Russia and change of power? For that an unexpected answer was from a London-based Russian solicitor, who offered a remark in a private discussion. His father-in-law owns a business in Siberia, where like in the most of the vast plains of the country winter (picture it: each morning a motorist has one out 10 chances to start his freezing car) starts from October and lasts until May. As the head of the business his father in law has a 1025 point list of things to do to prepare the enterprise and its employees for the winter, the implementation of which he starts in early May. The solicitor concluded that most people in Russia have no time for democracy. It got me into that depressed state of mind for the whole week. займы без отказа онлайн займы https://zp-pdl.com/get-a-next-business-day-payday-loan.php https://zp-pdl.com/best-payday-loans.php срочный займ на карту