Human Rights Bill Roils US-Russia Relations
First, Russia’s prime minister, Vladimir Putin, accused Washington of backing protests against him. Then, on Monday, Mitt Romney, the leading U.S. Republican candidate, told CNN that Russia is Washington’s “number one geopolitical foe.” The incidents stand as another roadblock to better U.S.-Russia relations.
Russia is finally set to join the World Trade Organization in August, after 20 years of talks. When it does, American companies could lose out because of a law passed almost four decades ago that restricted trade with the Soviet Union over its refusal to allow Jews to emigrate.
The Soviet Union no longer exists. There is visa-free tourism between Israel and Russia. But a Cold War relic – the 1974 Jackson-Vanick Amendment – would result in higher tariffs for American exports to Russia.
U.S. Ambassador to Russia Michael McFaul speaks of the impact.
“Now that Russia is joining the World Trade Organization, if we still have Jackson-Vanick on the books, then our companies will be at a disadvantage vis-a-vis other European, Chinese, Brazilian companies doing business here in Russia,” said McFaul.
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UN Official Slams Russia on Magnitsky Case
The UN Special Rapporteur on Torture published a report Tuesday condemning the Russian government over the death of lawyer Sergei Magnitsky.
The report by Juan E. Mendez said the state should take responsibility for Magnitsky’s death in prison, since he was healthy before his incarceration.
“When an individual dies as a consequence of injuries sustained while in State custody, there is a presumption of State responsibility, particularly when the person was in good health at the time of his arrest,” the report said.
Magnitsky was arrested in 2008 on charges of tax evasion, after he began investigating Interior Ministry and tax service officials in an alleged fraud case. He spent 11 months in prison without trial and reportedly developed a number of serious illnesses, for which he was denied treatment. He died eight days before he was legally required to be released if he were not put on trial.
Western governments have harshly criticized Russia over the case, with some countries considering so-called “Magnitsky acts” barring entry to officials believed to have been involved in the lawyer’s death. Magnitsky’s former employer, Hermitage Capital, has conducted a lobby campaign to pressure the Russian government to investigate the case.
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US trade upgrade may worsen relations with Russia
The Obama administration wants Congress to remove Soviet-era trade restrictions that have been a sore point in U.S.-Russia relations for decades. But the conditions lawmakers are demanding to make the change may only worsen America’s increasingly shaky relations with Moscow.
Republicans and Democrats are trying to tie the easing of the so-called Jackson-Vanik restrictions to a measure imposing sanctions against Russian officials linked to human rights abuses. That would infuriate Russia and would be the latest hitch in what administration officials consider a major foreign policy success: improved relations with Russia after a sharp downturn during the Bush administration. They call it the “reset.”
Obama administration officials are trying to keep the rights and trade measures apart. They are concerned about retaliation and do not want to aggravate relations further. Tensions have been growing over issues like missile defense and the international response to uprisings in Libya and Syria. But the U.S. still hopes for a degree of cooperation with Russia on other matters, such as stopping Iran’s nuclear program.
“We want to deal with trade issues in one sphere and democracy issues and human rights in another sphere,” said Michael McFaul, the U.S. ambassador to Russia.
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Putin, corruption and the Magnitsky case
It’s not easy to hear of how Russian lawyer Sergei Magnitsky was killed.
“you need to be sitting down for this story” said chair, Edward Lucas, foreign correspondent with the Economist. “…could those people at the back find a space?”
William Browder was once the largest foreign portfolio investor in Russia with the Hermitage fund before he was thrown out of the country in 2005.
Sergei Magnitsky
“25 police officers raided my office in Moscow” he says, “and 25 more police officers raided the office of my American law firm… One of the lawyers protested at the seizure of these documents and he was beaten so badly he was hospitalised for three weeks.”
Browder hired seven lawyers to find out more about the mess, one of them was a 36-year-old Sergei Magnitsky. They started an investigation that unearthed a high-level attempt to siphon a high-volume of funds. It was a complicated scheme that lead to a false tax refund of $230m that came – not fromBrowder’s company but from the Russian taxpayer.
Six out of seven of Browder’s lawyers left Russia for safety. Sergei Magnitsky decided to stay.
“He testified against the police officers who did the raid used to get the documents… and one month later the same police officers came to his home… and arrested him and put him in pre-trial detention and then began to torture him.”
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Russia’s Steve Biko; What Sergei Magnitsky’s brutal death tells us about the Kremlin’s leadership
In 1977, anti-apartheid activist Steve Biko was arrested by South African police, clubbed to within an inch of his life, chained, stripped, manacled, denied care and ultimately left to die in a car. More appalling was the apartheid regime’s response to his murder: denial, followed by coverup, followed by professions of indifference to Biko’s suffering.
For the generation of Westerners that came politically of age in anti-apartheid rallies—Barack Obama’s generation—Biko’s name became a byword for everything they were fighting against. So it is with most revolutionary movements. It’s not sufficient to have the example of great heroes in the mold of a Walesa or Suu Kyi or Mandela. They also require great victims: Men and women who, in the manner of their dying, demonstrate why it is their victimizers who must perish instead.
Last year, the Arab world found its Biko in Tunisian street vendor Mohamed Bouazizi. Now Russia may find its own Biko in the memory of Sergei Magnitsky, a mild-mannered, middle-class tax attorney from Moscow who spent the last of his 37 years in a filthy Russian prison before dying in November 2009 of medical neglect and physical torture.
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Will Russia Graduate From The Jackson-Vanik Amendment? By Krickus
The Obama administration wants to scrap the Jackson-Vanik amendment, a Cold War relic that could compromise American economic interests after Russia enters the World Trade Organization (WTO). U.S. firms could be denied access to the Russian market and those operating in it would not be protected by WTO rules. But there are members of Congress in both parties who oppose granting Permanent Normal Trade Relations (PNTR) status to Moscow without a trade-off; namely in return for scrapping the amendment, the Obama administration will endorse passage of the Sergei Magnitsky Rule of Law Accountability Act—named after the human rights lawyer who died under government custody. It is designed to punish Russian officials who engage in human rights violations, illegally seize property, and falsify elections. Among other things, they will be subjected to visa and financial sanctions.
Some supporters of this trade-off are doing so out of principle. They believe that it will offer the Russian people protections against human rights violations. This is not the view of the Obama administration. Michael McFaul, the U.S. Ambassador to Russia opposes linking wider commercial relations between Moscow and Washington to human rights. He argues that it will not advance Russia’s march towards democracy. Instead he urges congress to provide $50 million dollars to Russian NGO’s to enhance their capacity to build a civil society and notes as well that visa bans have already been issued against some Russian officials.
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Russia Explained, and It’s Not a Pretty Picture
If you have ever had the feeling that we never quite get the whole truth about Russia, Edward Lucas, in his new book, will explain why you have that feeling. Supposedly Russia is a democratic, market-driven capitalistic society, yet the country never makes any news other than when it’s shutting off gas supplies to Western Europe. Brazil makes business news. So do China and India. Those countries are making the world a more productive place. Russia, on the other hand, declares itself to be an economic power, but as you will learn in Lucas’s Deception: Spies, Lies and How Russia Dupes the West, Russia verges on being nothing but a huge criminal organization.
While he’s painting a horrific picture of Russia, Lucas also gives a detailed accounting of the espionage business. “Outsiders catch only fleeting glimpses of life in the shadows,” Lucas writes. His book takes readers into the shadows where almost comical ineptitude mixes with harrowing accounts of spies who met their ends at the hands of the Russian intelligence agencies.
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Russia: Another six years of Vladimir Putin?
Vladimir Putin is back in presidential office for a third term after four years as Russia’s Prime Minister. We will be asking what the people of Russia think of the man who has dominated the country’s politics for more than 12 years and will now be President for a new extended term of six years?
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An outdated sanction impedes leverage over Russia
What measures could be taken to exert pressure on the Kremlin without punishing ordinary Russians?
The US senators Scoop Jackson and Charles Vanik are dead. The country they sought to pressure – the Soviet Union – is gone, and Russia, for all its faults, does not restrict the emigration that they wanted to liberalise.
Yet the ghosts of the Cold War still haunt the US’s relations with the Kremlin. So too do other more recent ghosts, such as the ‘re-set’ – a useful gimmick in its day, perhaps, but now an embarrassment overdue for retirement.
The big argument in Washington, DC now is not about binning the re-set but about the Jackson-Vanik amendment, which restricts ‘most-favoured’ (ie, normal) trade relations with countries with non-market economies that restrict emigration.
In practice, Jackson-Vanik is an irritant, not an obstacle. The administration routinely waives its provisions. But would it send the wrong message to Vladimir Putin’s Kremlin to lift it unilaterally, as common sense demands now that Russia is joining the World Trade Organization? And if so, would visa restrictions on those involved in the Magnitsky affair be a sufficient counterweight? (It may be worth reminding some readers that Sergei Magnitsky was a Russian lawyer who uncovered a $230 million – €175m – fraud perpetrated on the Russian taxpayer by corrupt officials, was jailed as a result, kept in horrific conditions when he refused to snitch on his client, and died after a savage beating.)
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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
