Shadows and Light: US Policy Options, Human Rights, and Rule of Law in Russia
“What would your good do if evil didn’t exist, and what would the earth look like if all the shadows disappeared? After all, shadows are cast by things and people.” Mikhail Bulgakov, The Master and the Margarita
The Senate Subcommittee on European Affairs will conduct a hearing on Wednesday, December 14, to evaluate “The State of Human Rights and Rule of Law in Russia: Policy Options.”
In light of the Duma elections and in the shadow of Putin’s reaction to US criticism that the elections were “neither free nor fair,” the hearing will focus on the state of human rights and rule of law, evaluate US policy including the “reset,” and look forward at US policy assistance to the Russian people and human rights actors. It will also address the Sergei Magnitsky Rule of Law Accountability Act of 2011, “a Bill to impose sanctions on persons responsible for the detention, abuse, or death of Sergei Magnitsky, for the conspiracy to defraud the Russian Federation of taxes on corporate profits through fraudulent transactions and lawsuits against Hermitage, and for other gross violations of human rights in the Russian Federation, and for other purposes.” The Act was introduced in the 112th Congress by Senator Cardin with bi-partisian cosponsors including Senators McCain, Ayotte, Begich, Blumenthal, Durbin, Johanns, Kirk, Kyl, Leiberman, Rubio, Shaheen, Whitehouse, and Wicker.
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I’m Sick and Tired of the Kremlin’s Blatant Lies
Last week, anti-corruption blogger Alexei Navalny was arrested and sentenced to 15 days in jail for protesting election fraud.
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Time to increase pressure on Putin
Tomorrow in the European Affairs Subcommittee of the Senate’s Foreign Relations Committee, a number of activists will testify on Russian human rights abuses and pending legislation that would bar them from entering the U.S. Those testifying include The Post’s Robert Kagan (from the Brookings Institute), David Kramer of Freedom House, and Tom Malinowski of Human Rights Watch. In advance of the hearing, a group of human rights activists sent an open letter to the subcommittee which reads in part:
We are writing to encourage action to address widespread and egregious violations of human rights in the Russian Federation contrary to international commitments. For too long, there has been a culture of impunity for Russian officials involved in human rights violations. Many of these cases – such as the death of Sergei Magnitsky, an attorney investigating official corruption, and the trials and incarceration of Mikhail Khodorkovsky, a successful businessman and regime critic – are well known outside of Russia. Many others are not. We raise our voices on behalf of all Russians who have suffered serious human rights abuses by the government.
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Blacklisted by Putin
Prime Minister Vladimir Putin hopes to return to the president’s office in Russia, but he never really gave up any of the power that went with the office. Putin rules Russia with an authoritarian hand and has never been shy about raising it against his enemies, or those he perceives as enemies. William F. Browder knows that perhaps better than anyone.
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Public scoff’s over president’s online bid to probe vote fraud
President Dmitry Medvedev used his Facebook page Sunday to disclose that he had ordered an investigation into reports of election fraud, a statement his audience greeted with derision.
The posting quickly went viral, and drew more than 8,000 mostly offended and even offensive comments in a little over six hours, revealing the depth of the disillusionment with Mr. Medvedev, Prime Minister Vladimir Putin and their government. Tens of thousands of Russians spoke up in demonstrations across the country Saturday, protesting the Dec. 4 parliamentary elections, and they apparently had no intention of returning to their former silence.
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Dmitry Medvedev Facebook message against Russian protesters backfires
Dmitry Medvedev has been humiliated online after his Facebook page, in which he posted a message denouncing Saturday’s 50,000-strong rally in Moscow, was flooded by protesters criticising the Russian president.
The post, which came on the same day that the controversial head of the elections commission avoided an attempt to remove him, sparked disbelief and disgust and within two hours more than 3,500 people had posted comments, the vast majority overwhelmingly negative.
Mr Medvedev used the Facebook message to announce he had ordered an investigation into violations at the Russian parliamentary elections.
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Fighting the ‘Mafia State’
Russian businessman Alexei Kozlov was arrested and sentenced to eight years after falling out with his business partner, former Federation Council Senator Vladimir Slutsker. The villains in this case, alleges Kozlov’s wife, Olga Romanova, were prosecutors who were paid to trump up charges.
Romanova, an energetic and resourceful television reporter, was able to get her husband’s conviction overturned. In the process, she formed a human rights organization, Russia Behind Bars (rus-sidyashaya.org), to defend others railroaded by crooked law enforcement officials and combat abuses in the penal system. Russia Behind Bars has also become a resource to publicize miscarriages of justice and for mothers, wives and children of convicts simply to state their case, often for the first time.
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The Autumn of the US-Russia Reset
A colleague and I have described the post-Soviet era in Russia as the “age of impunity,” whereby even the most howlingly obvious crimes of man or state are implausibly denied or whitewashed in a manner redolent of Stalinist propaganda. Two such examples have furnished themselves in quick succession in the last month, one relating to the conviction of a notorious Russian arms dealer and the other to a Russian nuclear scientist’s facilitation of Iran’s atom bomb project. Both acts would have spelt the end of the US-Russian “reset” without the added complications of renewed brinkmanship over the placement of a US missile defense shield in Eastern Europe and the drubbing delivered to Vladimir Putin’s United Russia party in a transparently fraudulent parliamentary election on December 4th.
First the arms dealer. On November 2nd, Viktor Bout was sentenced in a New York court of attempting to sell heavy weapons to FARC, Colombia’s Marxist-Leninist terrorist group. Nicknamed the “Merchant of Death” and vaguely the model for Nicolas Cage’s character in the forgettable film Lord of War, Bout was a one-man clearinghouse of post-Soviet munitions for dictators and murderous regimes. There was scarcely a civil war fought in Africa in the 1990s and 2000s—and consequently, a limb dismembered or body decimated—without Bout’s hardware. He was chummy with the indicted war criminal and ex-president of Liberia, Charles Taylor. According to Bout’s biographer, Douglas Farah, the Merchant of Death was also seen schmoozing with Hezbollah in Lebanon in the summer of 2006, just prior to the second Israel-Lebanon War, which saw the Party of God firing Russian-made, armor-piercing antitank weapons that shocked even the IDF in terms of their sophistication and impact.
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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
