Magnitsky Plaza? Let’s Rename the Streets Outside Dictators’ Embassies
In the ’80s, the Senate renamed the street outside the Soviet Embassy Sakharov Plaza to protest the dissident’s treatment. It’s time to give similar reminders to today’s dictatorships.
In May 1984, when the communist authorities prohibited Andrei Sakharov’s wife from traveling abroad for medical treatment, the Soviet dissident began a hunger strike. Four years earlier, the government had exiled Sakharov to the city of Gorky, 250 miles east of Moscow, hoping to keep him out of the public eye. Sakharov had long been the most visible domestic political critic of the Soviet Union, winning the 1975 Nobel Peace Prize, which the country’s leaders prohibited him from accepting. To keep Sakharov alive, they force-fed him. “First, they would do it intravenously, then through a tube in his nose,” Sakharov’s wife, Yelena Bonner, wrote in a note smuggled out of the country. “A clamp would then be put on his nose and whenever he opened his mouth to breathe, they would pour food down his throat. Excruciating.”
Three months later, the United States Senate took a seemingly small but provocative step in protest of Sakharov’s treatment. Responsible for much of the administration of Washington, D.C., the chamber passed a measure changing the mailing address of the Soviet Embassy from 1125 16th Street to No. 1 Andrei Sakharov Plaza. From that point forward, every Soviet official entering his place of work would be confronted with his government’s repression of its most outspoken critic. “Every piece of mail the Soviets get will remind them that we want to know what has happened to the Sakharovs,” then-Sen. Alfonse M. D’Amato (R-NY), who proposed the measure, said at the time. The following year, the Soviet authorities permitted Bonner to travel abroad, and the year after that, reformist Soviet president Mikhail Gorbachev permitted Sakharov and his wife to return to Moscow.
Today, Sakharov Plaza is no more. But as Russia falls further into the depths of dictatorship under Vladimir Putin, the name of another human rights hero, Sergei Magnitsky, ought to grace the mailing addresses of Russian embassies and diplomatic postings in Washington and the capital cities of free countries around the world. A conscientious young lawyer who uncovered large-scale corruption by senior Russian government officials, Magnitsky was imprisoned, tortured, and denied medical treatment before suffering an agonizing death in 2009. A measure President Obama signed into law last year placing visa restrictions and asset freezes on Russian officials responsible for human rights violations was named after Magnitsky.
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Putin Promotes Judge Who Posthumously Convicted Magnitsky
Russian President Vladimir Putin has promoted a judge who presided over the landmark trial and conviction of whistle-blower Sergei Magnitsky after Magnistky died in police custody.
Hermitage Capital, the investment fund that employed Magnitsky, released information on October 25 from the Kremlin website showing Judge Igor Alisov was promoted from the Tverskoi district court to the Moscow City Court.
The August 29 decree promoting Alisov came just one month after Alisov became the first person in Russia to preside over the trial of a dead man.
“This looks like Judge Alisov’s payback for selling his soul to Vladimir Putin,” Hermitage Capital said in a statement.
Magnitsky, a lawyer for Hermitage Capital, died under torturous jail conditions in 2009 after exposing a massive scheme by Russian officials to defraud the government.
Judge Alisov also exonerated all the officials Magnitsky implicated in embezzling $230 million.
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Russia complains of ‘Cold War’ prejudice in EU visa talks
Russia’s EU ambassador has blamed Cold-War-era prejudice in some EU countries for lack of progress in visa-free talks.
Vladimir Chizhov told EUobserver that negotiations on letting Russian officials, or “service passport” holders, enter the EU without a visa are moving forward.
He said Russia agreed to limit the number of eligible people to those with passports which have electronic security features.
But he noted: “Some ‘fears’ still persist among certain EU countries, however ridiculous and reminiscent of the times of the Cold War they may seem, thus making the rest of facilitations envisaged hostage of their past and [creating] distrust unworthy of a genuine strategic partnership that we are striving for.”
He said the Russian officials in question are “mostly … engaged in further developing Russia-EU relations.”
His thinly veiled allusion to objections by former Soviet and former Communist EU member countries comes shortly before the next EU-Russia summit, expected in December.
The twice-yearly meetings have failed to yield concrete results in recent years.
One EU source said there could be a visa deal in time for December. But two other EU contacts voiced scepticism.
Russia has a few bargaining chips up its sleeve: It could drop punitive tariffs on EU car imports in return for a visa deal, or it could threaten to re-impose passenger data transfer demands on EU airlines.
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What’s Going on at Interpol?
Despite some dubious alumni, Interpol is, in theory, a good thing, but in practice it appears to be being abused by at least one of its members (clue: a very large country, name beginning with an “r” and run by a former secret policeman), and, oh yes, by the Soviet nostalgics over in Minsk too. Writing in European Voice, Edward Lucas notes:
[Western countries] should help Bill Browder, a London-based financier who is Magnitsky’s former client and champion [Sergei Magnitsky was an accountant who died in Moscow in circumstances that were murky and all too clear]. He risks arrest when he leaves the UK because Russia is shamelessly abusing the Interpol system, claiming that Browder is a wanted fraudster. EU countries should all say that they regard this as political persecution and have no intention of acting on it. That would give Browder safe passage.
Then there’s this, from Russian-untouchables.com:
When Petr Silaev, a Russian journalist, got political asylum in Finland in April 2012 after escaping a crackdown in his home country, he felt safe and began a new life. But in August the same year, he found himself handcuffed and shoved face-down on the floor of a police car on a seven-hour trip from Granada, Spain, where he went on holiday, to a detention centre in Madrid, where he risked extradition.
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Why we’re in need of our own Kremlin crusader…
The peoples of two countries own a great deal of gratitude to a man called Bill Browder. First of all, there are the citizens of Russia. And then there are the people of the UK.
Actually, I need to correct the latter sentence. It’s the people of the UK, excluding Northern Ireland. But more of that later.
As the super-wealthy boss of Hermitage Capital Management investment fund, Mr Browder is not immediately a figure you’d expect elicits much sympathy from ordinary folk.
But Bill Browder is different. He is at the centre of a long-running and dangerous feud with the government of Vladimir Putin.
It’s a complicated affair, but essentially Mr Browder, after 10 years of doing business in Russia, was blacklisted as a “threat to national security”.
According to The Economist, this was because he interfered with the flow of money “to corrupt bureaucrats and their businessmen accomplices”.
Corruption allegations in Russia aren’t new, but the Bill Browder affair degenerated into a spectacular morass of claim and counter-claim.
Infamously, his colleague Sergei Magnitsky, a Russian auditor and accountant, died on remand in a Russian jail after a life-threatening medical condition was not treated in spite of warnings.
Equally infamously, in July this year, Magnitsky was convicted of tax evasion, believed to be first trial in Russian history involving a dead defendant. It was state revenge of a most bizarre kind.
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Lifting England’s Libel Chill
Tourists will always flock to London to shop and see Big Ben. But they’re less likely to keep coming to settle legal scores after two High Court rulings Monday set clear limits against libel tourism in England and Wales. Along with new legislation from Parliament, the rulings might finally lift the chill on free speech and the free press under England’s plaintiff-friendly defamation laws.
The dispute at the center of Karpov v. Browder began with Russian lawyer Sergei Magnitsky’s prison death in Moscow in 2009. Magnitsky had been investigating a multimillion-dollar tax fraud by Russian officials against his client, Hermitage Capital. Pavel Karpov, a retired Moscow policeman, claimed that Hermitage CEO William Browder defamed him in a 2011 BBC interview, a 2012 article in Foreign Policy magazine, and in online videos about Magnitsky’s case.
Russian courts dismissed Mr. Karpov’s civil and criminal suits, so he took his case to London. Mr. Browder lives in Britain and is a U.K. citizen, but he argued before the High Court that Mr. Karpov has no reputation in England and Wales for Mr. Browder to have besmirched. Mr. Karpov rebutted that he has former schoolmates and an ex-girlfriend who live in England, and that he had previously traveled there “on five or so occasions.”
Justice Peregrine Simon threw the case out. Mr. Karpov’s “connection with this country is exiguous,” Justice Simon concluded, “and, although he can point to the [videos’] continuing publication in this country, there is ‘a degree of artificiality’ about his seeking to protect his reputation in this country.”
Mr. Karpov’s real intent—as he admitted in his libel claim—is to fight the sanctions against him imposed by America’s Magnitsky Act, for which Mr. Browder campaigned vigorously. The 2012 law prevents Mr. Karpov from entering and making financial transactions in the U.S. Justice Simon declared that the English justice system was hardly an appropriate forum to pursue that fight, especially considering that Russian courts had already rejected Mr. Karpov’s complaints.
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Dr Andrew Foxall on BBC Newsnight about libel tourism
Director of the Russia Studies Centre at the Henry Jackson Society, Dr Andrew Foxall, spoke to BBC Newsnight about the High Court’s decision to throw out a libel case against Bill Browder, the former client of Russian lawyer Sergei Magnitsky.
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‘Libel tourism’ knocked back by UK court
Two rulings Monday from the U.K. High Court will make it harder for foreign litigants to use libel tourism — a practice known to pose a serious threat to press freedom and free speech far beyond Britain.
The High Court dismissed a libel suit against William Browder and his company brought by a former Russian police officer. Browder, left, a U.K. citizen who lives in London, had accused Pavel Karpov of being one of several corrupt officials complicit in the detention and death of Sergei Magnitsky, a Russian lawyer who worked in Moscow for Browder and his company, Hermitage Capital Management.
Judge Peregrine Simon said Karpov had insufficient links to the U.K. ‘There is a degree of artificiality about his seeking to protect his reputation in this country,’ the judge said.
A second libel case unrelated to Browder’s was also thrown out by the High Court Monday. Serbian tobacco tycoon Stanko Subotic had sued banker Ratko Knezevic for libel. Knezevic had accused Subotic of murder, drug smuggling, and undergoing plastic surgery to hide his identify. Only one copy of the newspaper that carried the allegations, Politika, was found in Britain.
The court ruled that Subotic had suffered no damage in England even though there had been ‘minimal’ internet publication.
Libel tourism became widely known and feared after American writer Rachel Ehrenfeld was ordered to pay damages of £30,000 to a Saudi businessman she accused of funding terrorism. Only 23 copies of her offending book were sold in Britian, all through internet sales.
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Case of the Day: Karpov v. Browder
International Judicial Assistance
The case of the day is Karpov v. Browder, [2013] EWHC 3071 (QB). The case arose out of the death of Sergei Magnitsky in a Russian prison in 2009. Magnitsky had been investigating a tax fraud committed in Russia. His death in custody was widely condemned, and in fact, the US enacted a new statute, the Sergei Magnitsky Rule of Law Accountability Act of 2012, which prohibits those Russian officials the US government considered to be responsible for Magnitsky’s abuse and death from entering the United States or accessing the banking system.
The defendants in the case were Hermitage Capital Management Ltd., its CEO, William F. Browder, a UK affiliate of the Fund, and a Russian law firm, Firestone Duncan (CIS) Ltd. Magnitsky, before his death, had worked for Firestone Duncan. He was investigating an allegation that the Klyuev Gang, apparently an organized crime group, had conspired to take control of some Hermitage Fund subsidiaries and thus to procure an illegal $230 million tax refund from the Russian government, which went to the conspirators. After Magnitsky’s death, the defendants pushed for accountability. Their efforts included, notably, English- and Russian-language websites that featured videos. Mr. Browder also gave an interview to the BBC and wrote an article in Foreign Policy. In all of these materials, Pavel Karpov, a Russian investigator, was named. Karpov claimed that the materials were defamatory insofar as they implied that he was guilty of Magnitsky’s murder, that he was party to the tax fraud, and that he had previously trumped up charges against another, Fedor Mikheev, in order to cover up the fact that he (Karpov) had kidnapped Mikheev in an attempt to extort money from him.
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To learn more about what happened to Sergei Magnitsky please read below
- Sergei Magnitsky
- Why was Sergei Magnitsky arrested?
- Sergei Magnitsky’s torture and death in prison
- President’s investigation sabotaged and going nowhere
- The corrupt officers attempt to arrest 8 lawyers
- Past crimes committed by the same corrupt officers
- Petitions requesting a real investigation into Magnitsky's death
- Worldwide reaction, calls to punish those responsible for corruption and murder
- Complaints against Lt.Col. Kuznetsov
- Complaints against Major Karpov
- Cover up
- Press about Magnitsky
- Bloggers about Magnitsky
- Corrupt officers:
- Sign petition
- Citizen investigator
- Join Justice for Magnitsky group on Facebook
- Contact us
- Sergei Magnitsky
