One Hour Eighteen Minutes
One Hour Eighteen Minutes
Date: Wed 16 November 2011
One Hour Eighteen Minutes is a documentary play which pieces together the final hours of Sergey Magnitsky’s life. Sergey was a corporate lawyer who sued the Russian government for one of the most blatant cases of tax fraud in Russian history. Out of retaliation, the police arrested Magnitsky and threw him into jail. Over the course of eleven months, he was held in pre-trial detention, without charge, and tortured. He died in prison on November 16 2009. On the second anniversary of his death, this play is a dark and intimate look at a corrupt system – the medieval side of modern day Russia.
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Cameron, You Dropped the Ball
Dear Prime Minister Cameron,
During your recent visit to Moscow you claimed that you would like to take on the skeptics of the Russian-British relationship. I would like to accept that challenge.
In your speech at Moscow State University on Sept. 12, you outlined two types of skeptics — those who believe Britain is untrustworthy and for whom the relationship is connected to the Soviet past, and those, you said, who believe that Russia should not modernize, innovate and open up.
Taking your second set of skeptics first, I can think of almost no one who believes that Russia should not modernize, innovate or open up. Where did you get that from? You would have to be reliving the Cold War to believe that Russia should be deliberately kept down in any way. All reasonable people want a modern Russia, even if we only define modernization narrowly, as the Kremlin has done, as scientific-technical modernization.
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U.S. Senate Asked to Blacklist Yukos Foes
A group of humans rights activists, politicians and artists on Monday urged the U.S. Senate to blacklist 305 Russian officials linked to the jailing of former Yukos CEO Mikhail Khodorkovsky.
The list includes Prosecutor General Yury Chaika and Investigative Committee head Alexander Bastrykin, but not Prime Minister Vladimir Putin and his deputy Igor Sechin, whom Khodorkovsky has repeatedly named as his main enemies.
Rights champion Lev Ponomaryov, a co-signee, told The Moscow Times that Putin and Sechin were not included to make the proposal easier for U.S. senators to approve.
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Europe court: Russia violated rights of Yukos
Russia violated the rights of the now-defunct oil behemoth Yukos, the European Court of Human Rights ruled Tuesday. But the court rejected a contention that the prosecution of Yukos was politically motivated and deferred any ruling on nearly $100 billion in damages.
Russian authorities were unfair in meting out punishment to the company over tax violations and didn’t give Yukos enough time to prepare its defense, according to the ruling from the court in Strasbourg, France.
The ruling is open for a months-long appeal process available to both sides.
Yukos sought $98 billion in damages, the largest claim in the court’s 50-year history and one of Russia’s biggest legal challenges to date.
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Human rights court condemns Russia over collapse of Yukos
Fresh concerns about the perils of doing business in Russia erupted today when the European Court of Human Rights condemned the Kremlin for its role in bringing about the collapse of oil giant Yukos.
Judges ruled that Russia’s government violated the rights of the oil major – once the biggest in Russia – which was forced into bankruptcy over a multi-billion-dollar tax claim after its boss, Mikhail Khodorkovsky, was arrested in 2003.
Supporters of Khodorkovsky, who was jailed for nine years after being found guilty of six charges including tax evasion and remains in prison, claim he was the victim of a campaign by then-President Vladimir Putin to destroy a tycoon seen as a threat to his rule.
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U.S. Asked to Blacklist 305 Yukos Attackers by Russian Activists
Russian human-rights activists and opposition politicians have called on the U.S. Senate to blacklist 305 officials in Russia involved in the prosecution of Yukos Oil Co. and its owner Mikhail Khodorkovsky.
In a letter sent to Senate Majority leader Harry Reid and Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman John Kerry, the activists asked them to include the officials in legislation targeting human rights abusers in Russia, according to a copy of the petition posted on Khodorkovsky’s website.
U.S. President Barack Obama’s administration in July implemented a visa ban on a number of Russian officials after a similar request to punish human rights abusers. Russia warned it would retaliate, threatening to undermine the “reset” in relations between the two countries.
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Caving to the Kremlin
Judging from Prime Minister David Cameron’s visit to Moscow on September 12, the British government has decided to cave into the Russians in the long-running dispute over the November 2006 murder in London of former KGB officer Alexander Litvinenko. The victim, who was highly critical of Vladimir Putin and had been given asylum in Britain in 2000, died an agonizing death at a North London hospital on November 23, three weeks after being poisoned with polonium 210—a rare and highly lethal radioactive substance. As a result of Russia’s unwillingness to cooperate with its investigation of the crime, Britain ended intelligence sharing with Moscow and introduced new visa restrictions on Russian businessmen trying to go to the UK. But Cameron’s meeting with President Dmitry Medvedev and Putin this week indicates that Britain is reassessing its Moscow strategy—and by extension, its view of the Russian leadership.
At the heart of the Litvinenko dispute has been the British authorities’ attempt to extradite Andrei Lugovoi, an ex-KGB bodyguard, as the prime suspect in the murder. Somehow—and this raises serious questions about the possible involvement of members of the Russian government—Lugovoi and his business partner, former military intelligence officer Dmitry Kovtun, obtained polonium 210 and brought it to London on two separate trips in October-November 2006, when they met with Litvinenko. Traces of polonium were later discovered in the hotels and restaurants they visited, as well as on a British Airways plane that Lugovoi traveled on and in the apartment of Kovtun’s ex-wife, whom he stayed with in Hamburg on his way to London.
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No way in
Kommersant has a letter written by Russian opposition members, human rights activists and cultural figures in the US Senate which contains a request to impose the same restrictions on officials involved in the Yukos case as those which are being imposed on authorities associated with the Sergey Magnitsky case. The list compiled by the opposition includes 305 people: Prosecutor General Yury Chaika, head of the Investigation Committee Aleksandr Bastrykin, Moscow City Court Chairwoman Olga Yegorova, investigators, state prosecutors and judges associated with all parties in the Yukos case. The authors of the letter are hoping that the people whose names have been blacklisted will be banned entry to the United States and their foreign bank accounts, if they exist, will be frozen.
In particular, the letter addressed to the US Senate was signed by co-chairmen of the People’s Freedom Party Boris Nemtsov and Vladimir Ryzhkov, human rights activists Lyudmila Alekseeva and Lev Ponomarev, film director Eldar Ryazanov, People’s Artists of Russia Lia Akhedzhakova and Natalia Fateeva.
“With this letter we are showing support for the pending Sergey Magnitsky Rule of Law Accountability Act of 2011,” reads the letter. “However, Magnitsky’s case is not the only of its kind in our country.”
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Magnitsky death: Falling ill in a Russian jail
The ongoing dispute over the death in custody of Russian corporate lawyer Sergei Magnitsky has drawn attention to the Moscow remand prison where he was being held.
The gates of Butyrka, one of Russia’s oldest prisons, could well be in a museum. Made of oak and hand-wrought steel, they were installed when the prison was built 240 years ago.
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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
