Russia shifts ‘from legal nihilism to legal barbarism’

Democracy Digest

The last 12 years of Vladimir Putin’s rule were a “miracle of God,”the head of the Russian Orthodox Church said today, as Kremlin insiders cited a Washington-based democracy assistance group as a threat to the prime minister’s presidential bid.

But the news that Russian investigators intend to prosecute a dead lawyer, killed in jail after investigating official corruption, suggests only divine intervention will confer credibility on Putin’s promises this week to revive democracy, civil society and rule of law.

“We should make justice available to everyone by introducing administrative proceedings not only for businesses but also to hear disputes between citizens and officials,” Putin writes in The Washington Post today. “Civic organizations will be granted the right to file lawsuits with the aim of defending their members’ interests. We will eliminate the root causes of corruption and punish particular officials.”

The proposed posthumous trial of Sergei Magnitsky, a lawyer for Hermitage Capital, illustrates “the gap between Putin’s rhetoric and reality,” says one analyst. It provides further evidence of Russia’s shift “from legal nihilism to legal barbarism,” said the group’s chief executive William Browder.

“The lack of concern about how this appears abroad is astounding. This will only harden the position of foreign governments and parliaments who we have approached to impose sanctions across the world,” he said.

US senator Ben Cardin has sponsored the “Magnitsky Act”, which aims to impose personal sanctions on Russian interior ministry officials implicated in the case.

“True democracy is not created overnight. Society must be ready for democratic mechanisms,” says Putin. “In the 1990s we in Russia encountered both anarchy and oligarchy. Our society consisted of people who had freed themselves from communism but who had not yet learned how to be masters of their own destinies.”

But Russians had now attained sufficient maturity to shoulder the burdens of democratic responsibility, he writes.

“Our civil society has become much more mature, active and responsible. We need to modernize the mechanisms of our democracy so that they correspond to this increase in social activity.”

Yet Putin’s own re-election campaign, which has taken mudslinging to new lows, suggests that the Kremlin has yet to embrace civility and pluralism.

The harassment of Golos, the elections monitor that exposed widespread fraud during the December State Duma poll, and Putin’s proposed new restrictions or proscriptions on foreign financing of non-governmental organizations are “raising fears of a renewed crackdown.” As in Egypt, the authorities are claiming that foreign hands are directing the country’s democratic opposition in an attempt to whip up xenophobic opinion and intimidate civil society activists:

Last week, Putin’s campaign manager, Stanislav Govorukhin, said three prominent Washington-based NGOs where among the biggest threats to Putin’s re-election.

“The Henry M. Jackson Foundation, the Ford Foundation and the National Endowment for Democracy are all revived and give grants to any human rights or ecological organization and sponsor all sorts of Navalnys,” he told Izvestia, referring to anti-corruption blogger and protest co-leader Alexei Navalny.

When Helga Schmid, the European Union’s deputy secretary general for political affairs, visited Moscow last week, she had trouble setting up talks with opposition activists. Several of those invited declined, citing fears that such a meeting will be publicized and used against them in the presidential election campaign, which is becoming increasingly heated by mass anti-government rallies.

“They certainly sense that they are extremely scrutinized and that all their contacts are being watched,” a European Union source said on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the issue.

So much for Putin’s appeal to renew Russia’s democracy.

“In reality all his ideas and proposals are simply cosmetic changes which do not change a single principle, the principle of a monopoly on power,” Lilia Shevtsova of the Moscow Carnegie Center told AFP. “These are cosmetic and simply tactical concessions, they do not contain any real movement.”

“This is just pre-electoral populism pure and simple,” said Dmitry Oreshkin, an independent analyst and founder member of the Voters’ League. Putin “understands that something is changing in society and that to get votes he needs to show flexibility and a readiness to consider the demands of society,” he said. онлайн займ срочный займ на карту www.zp-pdl.com https://zp-pdl.com/online-payday-loans-in-america.php займы на карту