Canadians mull visa ban for Magnitsky officials
Canada is considering joining the United States in denying entry visas to Russian officials blamed for the death in jail of Hermitage Capital fund lawyer Sergei Magnitsky.
“The ongoing impunity, and indeed, in this instance shocking impunity regarding Russian officials is as scandalous as it is shocking,” Irwin Cotler, a member of Canada’s Parliament, said in introducing a bill to the legislature that would slap a visa ban on the officials’ families as well as on themselves.
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Unreported World: Vlad’s Army – Putin’s brave new world
Every Wednesday night, in a smoky basement restaurant in Moscow, some 20 well-dressed and, in some cases, extremely beautiful, women, meet for dinner. They have one thing in common. Their husbands are in jail. Many are serving long terms in degrading conditions. The grief on the faces of these wives, as they meet together for mutual support at the Rosso&Bianco wine bar, is distressing to see. All insist that their spouses are innocent. Each of the wives has a painful story to tell, and many have lost everything: their homes, businesses and family life.
Take Tatiana, an elegant blond woman in her mid-thirties, wearing a mauve shawl and a herringbone suit. She is visibly in shock, because it is only 24 hours since a Moscow court sent her husband, Vladimir, to jail for 13 years. He has been found guilty of raping their seven-year-old daughter. Tatiana knows the story cannot be true – medical tests showed the girl was physically unharmed.
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Magnitsky case probed by same investigators – Hermitage
Interfax
The Russian Interior Ministry’s Investigative Department has not found grounds for replacing investigators in the reopened criminal inquiry against Hermitage Capital lawyer Sergei Magnitisky who died in a Moscow jail in 2009, Hermitage Capital said.
“In his reply of October 7, 2011, to a complaint from the Magnitsky family, head of department P.V. Lapshov from the Russian Interior Ministry’s Investigative Department says, “Under Article 67 part two of the Russian Penal Code, previous participation of the investigator in the preliminary criminal inquiry is not a ground for his disqualification,” the company said.
Besides, regarding claims that investigators put psychological pressure on the lawyer’s relatives, the Department said that, “having examined the materials of the criminal case, it has not found any violation of the criminal procedural legislation.”
“Essentially, the reopening of the preliminary inquiry with respect to Magnitsky aims to ascertain. . all circumstances surrounding the case against Magnitsky,” the Interior Ministry was quoted by Hermitage.
“According to the materials submitted with the Moscow City Court this week, not only does the Interior Ministry continue the criminal inquiry against Sergei Magnitsky 20 months after his death, it has entrusted it to the same investigators who were probing him when he was alive,” the company said.
Magnitsky died in Moscow’s Butyrka pretrial detention center on November 16, 2009, while awaiting trial on tax evasion charges.
Rights defenders insist that prison medics and law enforcement officers are to blame for his death that caused a huge public outcry in Russia and abroad.
On July 4, 2011, the Investigative Committee announced the results of an additional forensic examination. As a result, criminal charges were filed against Butyrka medics – Doctor Dmitry Kratov (Article 293 of the Criminal Code, “negligence”) and laboratory doctor Larisa Litvinova (Article 109, “causing death by inadvertence”). займы онлайн на карту срочно займ на карту https://www.zp-pdl.com https://zp-pdl.com/best-payday-loans.php займы онлайн на карту срочно
Two Russias React to US Visa Sanctions Bill
Western proponents of realpolitik and the Kremlin’s “fellow travelers” routinely caution world leaders against criticizing Moscow over its dismal human rights and democracy record, as such criticism, in their view, would only “irritate Russia” and sour relations. This argument is true—if one takes “Russia” to mean Vladimir Putin’s unelected clique of corrupt bureaucrats, former security operatives, and billionaire friends. For those who do not equate a great nation with a rogue regime and pay attention to the genuine voices of Russian society, such a view is a travesty. With regard to human rights, nowhere is the discrepancy between the two Russias more evident than in the attitudes toward S.1039, the Sergei Magnitsky Rule of Law Accountability Act of 2011, a US Senate bill that would impose visa sanctions and asset freezes on Russian officials responsible for violating human rights, including “the freedoms of religion, expression, association, and assembly and the rights to a fair trial and democratic elections.”
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Russia Announces Retaliation For U.S. Magnitsky Bans
FIN Alternatives
Three months after the U.S. banned from entering the country 60 Russian officials linked to the death of hedge fund lawyer Sergei Magnitsky, Russia has responded in kind.
The Russian Foreign Ministry said Saturday that it had barred dozens of unidentified U.S. officials. While the ministry said it was targeting officials with ties to the controversial prison in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, the killings of civilians in Afghanistan and Iraq, and the kidnapping or abuse of Russians in the U.S., the move apparently fulfills the country’s promise in July to retaliate for the U.S. move. That month, a spokesman for Russian President Dmitri Medvedev said the country’s own bans would be “analogous to those announced by the State Dept.”
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Spate Of Suspect Deaths Casts Spotlight On Moscow’s Remand Prisons
Andrei Kudoyarov, director of Moscow school No. 1308 who was accused of accepting 240,000 rubles in bribes, died of a massive heart attack in a Moscow pretrial detention jail (SIZO) on October 8. His relatives and lawyers heard the news from media reports. Official confirmation came only on October 10.
The Kudoyarov case has once again cast a harsh light on Moscow pretrial detention centers, known as SIZO’s or “investigative isolation wards” in Russian, where, according to the Moscow Helsinki Group, some 50-60 people die in custody each year.
Suspects often spend months or even years in brutal conditions among sick and violent prisoners while awaiting their day in court.
Moscow human rights advocate Aleksandr Brod believes the Kudoyarov case points to a massive problem in the Russian legal system.
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Obama’s Russia Reset a ‘Disaster’
Chess champ-turned-opposition leader Garry Kasparov tells Eli Lake the upcoming Russian elections will be a “charade” and Obama’s Russia policy is a “disaster.” And he spares no word for George W. Bush or Condi Rice, either.
Many democratic opposition figures in countries sliding toward authoritarianism see Western election monitors as a lifeline, a chance for a fair election that might be fixed if not for the watchful eye of outside observers. That’s not the case for Garry Kasparov, the iconic chess champion who has emerged as a public face of Russian opposition to Vladimir Putin’s grip on power.
“We are asking Americans and Europeans not to send observers,” Kasparov said in an exclusive interview. “You understand Putin will get whatever he wants. What is the point of pretending this is an election? It’s a charade. Don’t interfere with it, just don’t pay respect to the charade.”
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Tall Ship Skips U.S. Port in Snub Linked to Jewish Case
A Russian frigate refused to dock in San Francisco on a Pacific tour because of concerns that it might be seized and held as collateral for a collection of Jewish books and manuscripts.
The three-masted Nadezhda turned sail on the advice of the Foreign Ministry, even though a welcome delegation was waiting for it at the pier, the ship’s owner, the Vladivostok-based Maritime State University, said Tuesday.
The incident took place last Friday, but the university only disclosed the official reason for the snub on its web site this week.
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Russia Claims Longer List Of U.S. Personae Non Gratae
Russia vowed that its tally of undesirable Americans will be longer than the corresponding list of Russians whose travel was restricted by Washington after a investment fund’s lawyer died of untreated illnesses in a Moscow jail.
“Our list will be longer,” Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov told local newswires Tuesday, later admitting that “the names won’t be disclosed.”
Moscow last week confirmed it had put U.S. officials on a visa blacklist, a move that coincided with Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s visit to former Soviet republics in central Asia. The U.S. State Department in July had announced its own restrictions, imposed as the Senate was considering not only a travel ban, but also the freezing of U.S. assets linked to 60 officials involved in a case that led to the death of 37-year-old Sergei Magnitsky.
The Russian officials on Senator Benjamin Cardin’s list, which doesn’t necessarily correspond to the State Department’s list, include judges, prosecutors, prison workers and other officials from the Interior Ministry and the Federal Security Service, the successor to the Soviet-era KGB.
For its part, the Russian Foreign Ministry has indicated it may ban travel to Russia for Americans suspected of “wrongful acts against Russian nationals in the U.S.” or linked to what it called the murder of civilians in Iraq and Afghanistan and the detention of prisoners in Guantanamo.
Mr. Magnitsky died in 2009 after testifying in court that senior police officials took documents from an international investment fund, then used them to defraud the Russian government of tens of millions of dollars in tax refunds. Russian investigators said Mr. Magnitsky died of heart disease and hepatitis, and they recently opened probes into a doctor and prison official. Russia’s Foreign Ministry says the U.S. is “well aware of efforts by the Russian authorities to investigate” the lawyer’s death.
Although the Moscow-Washington spat could hurt President Barack Obama’s goal of “resetting” relations with Russia, the reciprocal travel bans, no matter how extensive they turn out to be, are unlikely to dent the tourism industry deeply in the two countries.
The U.S. Department of Commerce expects only 208,000 Russian travelers to visit the U.S. this year, about the same number expected from Ecuador. Meanwhile, Russia reported only 262,000 trips from U.S. citizens last year, about a third as many as from China or Lithuania. займ онлайн займы онлайн на карту срочно female wrestling https://zp-pdl.com/online-payday-loans-in-america.php www.zp-pdl.com займ на карту срочно без отказа
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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
