Why Do “Progressives” Like Samuel Charap Shill for Russia and Oppose the Magnitsky Bill?

Minding Russia Blog

I’m liberal, but not “progressive” — and there’s a reason.

And that’s because I often feel that many of the positions “progressives” take (I always put the term in scare quotes because I don’t think it’s a valid description) are antithetical to universality and human rights. It’s usually about a certain kind of myopia and selectivity — a propensity to take out the magnifying glass for the sins of America or Israel, yet not find a thing to say about Palestinian or Taliban terror, even if provided with a telescope. And telescopes are what they do use to look for some problems, and not others, far away — the killing by American troops of civilians in Afghanistan, but never the killings by the Taliban, which make up now 85 percent of the civilian deaths. “Progressives” cheer Egyptian democracy demonstrators, even if they throw rocks; they look fearfully around and ask questions about one broken door caused by provocateurs in Belarus the night 600 people were arrested, many beaten brutally by police. Or maybe they’ve never heard of Belarus…

With the exception of Israel, nowhere do you see the gap in the “progressive” conscience, that can plead for justice and human rights and dignity in so many places, than on Russia. On Russia, the “progressives” can be as horribly indifferent to massive human rights problems as the Kremlin itself, and worse, justify them. They can advocate Realpolitik like the Nixon administration and Kissinger; they can back the “reset” without a single question about press freedom or the North Caucasus. Is this just a harkening back to the old Moscow line of the socialist movements of the 1960s and 1980s that always shielded Moscow from criticism? Or is it a more modern form of OstPolitik that imagines that the statecraft of foreign policy — one controlled by proper liberals, of course — will do best if it doesn’t antagonize another great power? What is this really all about?

Today’s cunningly and misleadingly titled essay by Samuel Charap at the Center for American Progress, Congress Deserves a Voice on Human Rights in Russia, therefore comes as no surprise — and should be exposed for the gap in liberal morality that one always finds in progressives. Charap is the director for Russia and Eurasia at Center for American Progress and comes credentialed from working at the Center for Stategic and International Studies (the think-tank that was willing to take funding from the government of Kazakhstan while Kazakhstan was chair-in-office of the OSCE) and of course has consulted for Eurasia Group and Oxford Analytica, who have to remain chummy to Eurasian regimes to get intel. Understood! Dialogue is all — but I would imagine the line of morality would be drawn somewhere above where Russian officials and propagandists place it on the case of Sergei Magnitsky — a case the Kremlin’s myrmidons tell you to shut up about, because you’re ruining the reset (and I’ve had personal experience with this.) Why the need to put up a high-profile piece at the Center for American Progress to bang on a seemingly non-controversial human rights-motivated piece of legislation, admittedly likely not to have much effect? Says Charap:

The death of the young lawyer Sergei Magnitsky in pre-trial detention in a Moscow prison in November 2009 was a horrific crime, with serious implications for the development of the rule of law in post-Soviet Russia. Congress is right to be concerned.

Yet counterintuitvely, this seemingly thoughtful liberal tells us this:

But the legislation recently introduced to address the Magnitsky case neither furthers the cause of democratic development in Russia nor provides justice for his apparent murder.

And it would be a mistake, as some have suggested, to use it as a “replacement” if and when Congress does graduate Russia from the provisions of the Jackson-Vanik amendment.

As I’ve explained myself on Jackson-Vanik, I’m definitely not for repealing the legislation itself, so as not to hand the Kremlin any undeserved moral victory, and to keep it available for countries particularly in the post-Soviet space that don’t have market economies and restrict emigration — like Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan which still maintain exit visa systems or arbitrary blacklists. There’s no reason why you have to get rid of the law, which would be very difficult to put into place again, just because Russia has graduated out of the terms of Jackson-Vanik that apply to it (we didn’t do this for Ukraine or China when they graduated). In the same way a permanent waiver could be granted to Russia. The notion that “if Jackson-Vanik stays on the books, the US will be in violation of WTO rules and American firms would stand to lose big” certainly is debatable. Again, you don’t need to dismantle Jackson-Vanik to have a Congressional and/or presidential permanent waiver for Russia on the grounds that it is more or less now a market economy and no longer restricts departures. As for “losing big,” there should be a little more analysis there of just how much trade is really benefiting America there, but even so, this could be worked out.

The Magnitsky bill is valid in its own right, and not merely absorbing the burden of having to substitute for Jackson-Vanik if that legislation is repealed. Jackson-Vanik was only about emigration and not about the overall human rights conditions in a country, although it served as a hook to hold hearings on those issues back in the day, and the Magnitsky bill could possibly do the same thing — but it can surely stand on its own. Magnitsky’s case isn’t an isolated one; it is an atrocity in its own right, given the numerous *deliberately cruel* facets of the system it exposes, but abusive pre-trial conditions and unfair trials — these are the norm for many people in Russia and for business people, it should stand as a huge warning.

And here’s where the progressive mind stumbles so visibly — on the notion of universality — tripped up by one case from applying what should be universal values of due process:

First, while Jackson-Vanik dealt with a universal right on a global scale, this bill is targeted at one individual’s case in a single country. While the U.S. government is in a position to make a judgment about another government’s implementation of the freedom to emigrate, it cannot possibly make definitive public judgments – nor should it – about the guilt of individuals for a specific crime committed in a foreign country.

Wait — the US government can’t make a judgement about a man dying in pre-trial detention?! Or is Charap unconsciously giving away the store here, implying that he thinks that people who die in pre-trial detention over a tax case aren’t valid? No one should die in pre-trial detention — and that means yes, there are guards and officials who are specifically guilty of a crime here — although I suspect that’s not what Charap was implying — he means the tax case.

Jackson-Vanik dealt with the universal right to leave and return to one’s country (this became reduced to the one-way concern of emigration in the case of the Soviet Union).

The Magnitsky bill doesn’t just deal with one person’s set of circumstances — or the guilt of the Hermitage firm or those like Magnitsky who defended it. That’s appalling, putting the case in those terms — implying that you get to die in pre-trial detention if your taxes aren’t in order.

In fact, if you read the elements of the case of Magnitsky, of course you see that it is not only about the outrageous arbitrariness of state power, bearing down on private companies and manipulating the facts; it’s about the injustice of mistreatment in detention — Russia’s prisons remain among the most abusive of the world — and the idea that you punish white-collar economic crimes with imprisonment even before trial, let alone after trial. I think what many people trying to compare these types of cases in Russia and the US can’t grasp is that it’s not only that a case like Hermitage, if it were to occur in the US, would lead at worse to fines or suspensions of licenses if found guilty (and there is no evidence that it *is* guilty); the type of situation where the government could re-route your tax payments and lie about it and brutally cover it up would have a much harder time occurring in the US with a free press, an independent bar, democratically-elected Congress people, and numerous civic groups.

These things matter, and the Magnitsky case exemplifies the absence or great weakness of all of these factors in Russia. We should all get behind calls for investigation of this private firm’s claims of financial machinations not only for the sake of this one firm, but because it’s typical of so many other cases — even law firms and accounting firms buckle under Kremlin pressure — the Khodorkovsky case also exemplifies all the issues of state manipulation as well, and there are many more.

Indeed, it is through the cases of individuals that you can witness how much of a static autocracy Russia remains — and it is only through individual cases that you illustrate principles that “progressives” prefer to keep abstract and thematic and discount any individual illustrations as aberrations when it suits. If Russia is *not* a static autocracy, why are none of the liberal parties that could at least win five percent in fair elections in the parliament? Why are the cases of journalists, lawyers, and human rights activists injured or killed never prosecuted? How could the awful violence that has maimed journalists’ lives around the Khimki forest cause ever be allowed to continue — who is backing those who launch such outrages? Why does the obviously politically-motivated case of Khodorkovsky and colleagues continue — even Amnesty International, so “progressive” and so illiberal these days, has been forced to concede that he is a prisoner of conscience. These cases aren’t rare exceptions; they’re all too common and illustrate the enormous arbitrary power of a state that will not succumb to the rule of law. That’s what it’s all about.

Charap is entitled to his opinion but, as they say, he’s not entitled to his facts — and the facts aren’t available to back up the claim that that Russia’s legal system “has undergone significant changes since Magnitsky’s death to strengthen anti-corruption mechanisms and prevent pre-trial detention for all economic crimes.” Huh? Why would President Dmitry Medvedev’s proclaimed intentions about these things be taken for reality? And wouldn’t the place to begin showing good will about such changes, if made, be the second round of charges against Khodorkovsky, and the new sentence — and prosecution of Magnitsky’s tormentors?

As for “drawing the Russian government into as many norm-based institutions [like the WTO] that create binding legal obligations as possible,” I can’t think of a more morally vacuous and ill-informed concept on the planet these days. Um, Russia already belongs to norm-based institutions — like the Council of Europe, the United Nations and the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe. It was brought into the Council of Europe on the condition that it prosecute properly the cases in fact now before the European Court of Human Rights of atrocities against Chechen villagers by Russian troops — for the most part, it has not done so. At the UN, Russia blocks progress on action on its own immediate CIS allies routinely, but also on mass crimes against humanity in Syria by opposing any action by the UN Security Council. Russia’s often the problem there, and terribly selective when it does get a sudden humanitarian conscience, i.e. trying to sponsor resolutions condeming US and NATO troops killing civilians in Afghanistan, but not willing to include within the same resolution the greater problem of Taliban killings, including of UN personnel and humanitarian workers.

At the OSCE, as you can see from this WikiLeaked frank admission, Russia blocks democratic programs everywhere, and has the cynical temerity to make “right of reply” on protestations against its complicity — through inaction — in the murder of journalists and human rights activists, making it seem like because a prosecutor met with a US human rights group like the Committee to Protect Journalists, that therefore they’ve done all they need to do. The oustanding cases at the European Court of Human Rights on Russia, not to mention the folders of human rights groups in Russia and abroad are chock full of human rights violations in Russia and are an eloquent refutation of the notion that being in norm-based bodies somehow automagically confers norm-following behaviours. It does not. If anything, it erodes what protections universality can afford by the duplicity involved, not only due to the mendaciousness about its own record, but Russia’s active undermining of those mechanisms that do try to function even-handedly to address states’ violations.

As for the notions that “the Russians themselves, not the Secretary of State, are the only ones who can create accountability for Sergei Magnitsky’s death and build the rule of law in their country” — well frankly, no. The rule of law sure does start at home, but in countries where the rulers deliberately flout it, like Russia, outside pressure is needed — and valid. When there are grave and systematic problems of human rights, countries, including our own, seldom do the right thing unless the rest of the community of democratic notions prod them. The reason we have universal human rights and the entire international law machinery put in motion by the better consciences of states is to create a community of compliance and enforcement that alone states can fail to provide. The Universal Periodic Review conducted by countries of each other as peers at the UN Human Rights Council — as flawed as that body is, in part due to Russia’s machinations — is based on that principle. Yes, only a country itself — and a freely elected people — can produce those institutions of the rule of law that protect civil rights. But the very heart of the international human rights premise secured in the Helsinki Final Act of 1975 and other agreements, is that human rights is not an internal affair of any country, and the proper subject of bilateral and multilateral dialogue under those very universal norms proclaimed.

I’m not surprised that Charap — like another “progressive” before him, Barack Obama, in his first meeting with Russians after taking office — undoes 36 years of Helsinki precedent in suddenly invoking the “leave Russia to the Kremlin” argument — as if there really were freely acting Russians who could undertake these reforms unhindered, in good faith. One of the things that the OSCE was able to accomplish, as weakened as it is by Russia — and deliberately weakened — is to pronounce that elections for parliament and president as flawed.

Russia has not issued an open invitation to the special rapporteurs of the UN system — unlike Ukraine, for example — and the special rapporteur on torture has not been able to visit for more than five years, and the recommendations of past SRs have not been implemented.

Why would the pragmatic and economics-oriented “progressive” imagine that the norms of the WTO will be more absorbed by osmosis more readily than human rights norms? To be sure, human rights goes to the heart of the power struggle in any country and economic practices may be easier to secure — except anyone really studying this in good faith will find that the real problem of Russia the rule of law, whether on a business or an NGO.

As for whether the Magnitsky legislation is “effective,” well, human rights legislation seldom is. That isn’t why you implement it. It takes time and campaigning by citizens. Jackson-Vanik in fact showed how a seemingly hopeless and abstract norm could lead to the emigration of tens of thousands of people and eventually institutionalization of the right to leave the country. But it took that.

As for this apolitical new middle class, that is supposedly willing to push behind the scenes for change — as long as nobody out in front is too noisy and as long as pesky foreigners stay out — sorry, I’m unconvinced and I won’t be holding my breath for them. I’m not at all certain they *do* see Magnitsky as one of their own, “a competent professional just doing his job” — usually what happens in these cases is a tangible absence of solidarity, as people think “it couldn’t happen to me” and “he must have actually done something wrong.”

As for the patronizing and thunderous head-patting involved with the “Congress deserves a voice on human rights and the development of the rule of law” — well, it has one, and that’s why the Magnitsky bill has support. We don’t need another body created as a sop after graduation from Jackson-Vanik, as we already have a well-functioning one: the Congressional Commission on Security and Cooperation in Europe that monitors and implements OSCE agreements. And we don’t need smarmy little lectures to “manage our own expectations about creating change” — our job here is to back with human solidarity and such affordances of the international human rights system as we can manage to activate (despite Russia’s obstacles) in defense of those people inside Russia on the front line.

Look, the society is not so “complex,” as Charap claims. The government can break people’s arms — or not break them. It can prosecute people that feel impunity in breaking people’s arms — or not. You don’t need economic prosperity or “development” to not break people’s arms. The Kremlin can place itself under these basic norms of universality — or not. We can be “facilitating and assisting” if we do not break faith with these people, and that means solidly invoking the universal norms that in fact dictate legislation like the Magnitsky bill. The only way societies change — and we have seen this with our own — is not merely if you create a better law for the future, but if you prosecute the crimes of the past.

Indeed, where we as a country fail to do this (on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan), we continue in a moral and political muddle — one that “progressives” can readily concede about America, but become strangely reticent when it comes to the former Soviet Union.

Why is that? Why is it that “progressives” can see the flaws of America or Israel but become tongue-tied on Russia? Is this just a hangover of the Soviet era, where good leftists were taught to see something “progressive” about the Soviet state that supposedly took care of economic rights (it didn’t, but was good at lying about it)?

Or is it about pragmatic RealPolitik, prudently not pissing off our allies needed to keep the peace, and pursuing narrow “progressive” technical objectives like reducing nuclear arms (as if they ever got reduced any other way than by having democratic governments in Russia!)? Perhaps it’s both, but I really think the “progressives” can’t justify their curious double standard on Russia and their curious unwillingness not only to unambiguously condemn obvious human rights crimes in Russia but not support moral measures like the Magnitsky bill to counter them. It’s creepy.

When it comes down to it, despite its obvious universalist implications, the Magnitsky bill is about one set of circumstances, stopping a finite set of people who are responsible for letting a man in dire medical straits unnecessarily die in pre-trial detention — as a way of pressuring him and his colleagues to give up his just and valid defense of a company. That emblematic gesture of justice should be welcomed by “progressives” who claim ardent concern for justice. That it is not begs the question: why all the opposition to a bill about one man? What’s really up?

We realize Russia doesn’t want this, not only because they hate solving the one case, but because they, more than any of us, realize just how much justice in one case can unravel the premises of all their unjust rule (and for this we can look no further than the case of Oleg Orlov, which took far too long to resolve, and which ended happily only because the Kremlin was willing not to see justice done, but was willing to manipulate the case as part of a deterrence on the Frankenstein they had created in Kadyrov.)

As for this sort of thing:

funding for some of the innovative approaches to these issues pursued by the Obama administration, including efforts on U.S.-Russia civil society to civil society cooperation, that saw a group of Russian government officials and NGO leaders come to Washington earlier this month to meet with a wide array of relevant stakeholders and get into the nuts and bolts of anti-corruption measure.

Oh, joy, you had a seminar! Perhaps you even passed a joint statement! And then what?

As I’ve explained in this piece and of course many other entries on this blog, the McFaul-Surkov Commission is awful in so many ways, not the least of which is the sheer non-necessity of having to have secret meetings off the record with government officials whom dissidents in Russia have openly, even on television, confronted. The Commission undermines the work of less co-opted human rights groups who are willing to take up not just the fashionable thematic causes like “corruption” (selective in their application) but actual cases and real legislative change.

You want “nuts and bolds of anti-corruption measures”? Corruption has always and everywhere only been solved by real application of the rule of law on real cases. It’s not just a nice topic for a seminar and a study funded by a Western foundation as a feel-good. Corruption is what happened in the Magnitsky case — and it was on the part of the government, not the company, and that’s why Magnitsky died. The nuts and bolts of corruption are precisely in his case as well as that of Khodorkovsky and others. If you cannot confront it right there, right now with this bill, and with keeping Jackson-Vanik in place while graduating Russia, then you are conceding that the Kremlin gets to corrupt not only its own setting in Russia, but the international arena. займ срочно без отказов и проверок займы на карту https://zp-pdl.com/online-payday-loans-cash-advances.php www.zp-pdl.com займ на карту без отказов круглосуточно