Show trial strengthens the case for an EU Magnitsky Act

Financial Times

The posthumous trial of Sergei Magnitsky, the anti-corruption lawyer beaten to death in a Moscow jail, is not just the moment Russia’s legal system becomes the theatre of the absurd, but something worse. It is a show trial that harks back to the blackest days of the Soviet Union. Even in the Stalin era, however, such trials took place before defendants met their deaths in the dark recesses of the penal system, not after.

Posthumous trials are not unheard of in history. Pope Formosus (891-896AD) was tried post mortem by political enemies in the Cadaver Synod. Joan of Arc’s sentence was annulled in a retrial after her death; Oliver Cromwell’s body was exhumed to be posthumously “executed”. The Nazi Martin Bormann was named as a defendant in the 1945 Nuremberg trials, his whereabouts unclear, and later proved to be dead.

But in modern legal practice, posthumous trials are usually held to provide justice for victims, or to clear a defendant’s name. A 2011 constitutional court ruling in Russia allowed such a hearing if the defendant’s family pressed for it. In this case, none of those elements applies.

Mr Magnitsky’s trial on trumped-up tax evasion charges is a clear attempt to blacken his name. It comes as Bill Browder, his former employer, embarks on a push to persuade European capitals to adopt measures similar to the US Magnitsky Act – which imposed visa bans and asset freezes on officials implicated in the lawyer’s death. Yet if the Kremlin believes a “guilty” verdict obtained in such bizarre fashion will alter perceptions outside Russia, that shows how divorced from reality it has become.

Such a verdict could, however, be useful for internal consumption. It might help the authorities fit the Magnitsky Act, and any similar steps elsewhere, into a narrative long espoused by Vladimir Putin that Russia is surrounded by enemies intent on meddling and bringing it to its knees.

That narrative has been propagated with even greater energy since the pro-democracy protests that accompanied Mr Putin’s return to the presidency last year. It is part of a wave of conservatism and soft nationalism manipulated by the leadership that seems designed to appeal to Mr Putin’s “base” supporters in the provinces, over the heads of the urban middle class whose support he has lost.

In fact, the west has no desire to interfere in or weaken Russia, only to hold it to the respect for basic rights – including those of fair trials and due process – that it signed up to when it ratified the European Convention on Human Rights in 1998. More than three years after his death, neither Mr Magnitsky’s killers nor those responsible for the $230m theft of state funds he was investigating have been brought to justice.

As long as that remains the case, EU states should ignore Moscow’s attempts to divert them and press ahead with their own Magnitsky measures. The surreal trial of Mr Magnitsky should only harden their resolve.
unshaven girl hairy woman https://zp-pdl.com/fast-and-easy-payday-loans-online.php https://zp-pdl.com/fast-and-easy-payday-loans-online.php займ на карту