Stop the Untouchables. Justice for Sergei Magnitsky.

Moscow Decries U.S. Move to Deny Visas

The Wall Street Journal. By RICHARD BOUDREAUX

MOSCOW—Russia denounced a U.S. decision to deny visas to dozens of officials suspected of involvement in the imprisonment and death of a corruption-fighting lawyer and warned that it would act to protect “the rights of Russian citizens from illegal actions by foreign states.”

The Foreign Ministry said Wednesday that the travel restrictions, imposed this week without formal notification to Russian authorities, had created “a strong irritant” in the two countries’ relations. “The Russian side will not leave such unfriendly measures unanswered,” the ministry said in a brief statement.

Russia’s initial response to the visa ban, which U.S. State Department officials disclosed to American lawmakers this week and confirmed publicly Tuesday, was otherwise muted. The ministry statement didn’t specify any retaliatory measures, and senior Russian officials refrained from commenting.

The Obama administration’s action brings U.S. pressure to bear in a landmark human-rights case in Russia—the death of Sergei Magnitsky of untreated illnesses after 11 months in jail. The restrictions are also an effort to head off Senate legislation that would not only impose a travel ban, but also freeze any American assets held by officials involved in the case. They include judges, prosecutors, prison officials and others from Russia’s Interior Ministry and Federal Security Service.

In a memo to lawmakers, the State Department said the more sweeping restrictions backed by some senators would risk undermining President Barack Obama’s policy of reset with Russia. It might jeopardize U.S. efforts to win Russian support for sanctions against Iran, North Korea and Libya and could also imperil U.S. military transit routes through Russia to Afghanistan, the memo said.

Mr. Magnitsky died in November 2009 at age 37. He had testified in court that senior police officials stole documents from the hedge fund he worked for, Hermitage Capital, and used them fraudulently to take possession of millions of dollars in tax refunds. He was arrested on tax evasion charges by the same police officials he had accused.

Russia’s Investigative Committee concluded this month that Mr. Magnitsky had died of heart disease and hepatitis. It opened criminal probes against a doctor and a prison official who allegedly neglected his health. Supporters of the lawyer say that senior investigators who kept him in poor condition had escaped legal proceedings.

The foreign ministry said in its statement Wednesday that the U.S. was “well aware of efforts by the Russian authorities to investigate the Magnitsky tragedy fully and thoroughly.”

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The Kremlin is furious about America’s visa blacklist. But there is nothing Barack Obama can do about it

The Telegraph. By Michael Weiss

The Kremlin is furious about America’s visa blacklist. But there is nothing Barack Obama can do about it
By Michael Weiss Politics Last updated: July 28th, 2011

The Washington Post reported this week that the US State Department has blacklisted Russian officials implicated in the death of Moscow attorney Sergei Magnitsky, the enterprising young Moscow attorney who exposed a $230 million state-perpetrated tax fraud. Magnitsky was thanked for his efforts by being accused of the crime himself, jailed, tortured, deprived of medical attention, then left to die in a strait-jacket as prison doctors waited outside the room. L’affaire Magnitsky is a far-reaching state conspiracy that, in terms of its emotional resonance and long-term political consequences for Russia, merits comparison with the Kirov assassination in 1934. Sixty Russian officials, including the deputy interior minister and the deputy general prosecutor, have all been flagged by US Senator Ben Cardin for their complicity in Magnitsky’s imprisonment and demise.

The State Department announcement anticipates a Congressional vote on the Sergei Magnitsky Rule of Law Accountability Act, which is currently floating around the Senate on an air of bipartisan consensus. Its passage is only a matter of time. If successful, the law would not only create visa blacklists for corrupt Russian officials, it would also freeze their assets in the United States and act as a template for dealing with other international human rights violators who love to shop in New York or send their kids to private schools in Washington. European parliament last year adopted a resolution calling for similar EU sanctions on those implicated in the Magnitsky case.

You can just imagine the Kremlin’s response.

Several weeks ago, it dispatched Vladislav Surkov, Putin’s ideologist-in-chief, to lobby Washington to nix the bill on the grounds that this legislation would scupper the hyped “reset” between Russia and the United States, which has really only served as more of a pause on deep-seated mutual suspicion.
Despite a few treaties on nuclear arms reduction and bilateral trade agreements being signed, the reset has actually achieved very little in terms of normalising US-Russian relations. We still don’t agree on what to do about Iran. Dmitry Medvedev says he feels “sorry” for Bashar al-Assad as Russia threatens to veto any UN Security Council resolution on Syria. And Anti-Americanism remains the prevailing mood in the Kremlin. The large but disorganised anti-Putin opposition movement in Russia is routinely blamed on the CIA and the State Department. Ditto the post-2008 economic crisis, and before that the spate of Colour Revolutions that swept Ukraine and Georgia, into whose domestic political affairs Russia continues to exert itself.

According to the last known study, 78 per cent of the Russian elite have a KGB background. And Putinist propaganda, never a subtle affair to being with, has lately assumed a unmistakable neo-Soviet style. Consider the All-Russia People’s Front, a Kremlin-concocted “grassroots” organisation that adores United Russia, the ruling party, and yet which registers signatories at the speed of quantum mechanics. In a single day, 39,000 employees of the Siberian Business Union joined, no doubt without many of them even being aware of the Front’s existence. Membership is so easy that a few weeks back I registered as a Muscovite housewife called Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn.

Cold War-style paranoia, and Stalinist methods of cultural suppression, never quit Putin’s Russia; it would foolish of Washington to believe otherwise. Lately, Kremlin aggression has manifested itself into overt acts of violence. According to a classified US intelligence document reported on by The Washington Times, the bomb that exploded outside the US embassy in Tiblisi last September was the work of a Russian military intelligence officer, Major Yevgeny Borisov. What if a US diplomat had been killed in that explosion? Vice President Biden, who can’t pronounce Mikhail Khodorkovsky’s name, might have had to pronounce an easier one on his last state visit to Moscow.

Obama has never been one to put human rights above America’s elusive likeability abroad. No wonder Medvedev told the Financial Times recently that “no one wishes the re-election of Barack Obama as US president as I do”. But the US president can no more veto a unanimous piece of human rights legislation than he can pardon Bernie Madoff. That’s the trouble with liberal democracies, as Putin himself would acknowledge: the man in this White House isn’t the only one in charge.
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Russians Linked to Jail Death Are Barred From U.S.

The New York Times. By Andrew E. Kramer

MOSCOW — The Obama administration has disclosed one of its sharpest policy responses to Russian human rights abuses, telling American lawmakers that dozens of Russian officials have been quietly barred from the United States over their involvement in the detention and death two years ago of a Russian lawyer fighting an enormous fraud and corruption case.

Enlarge This Image

Hermitage Capital Management, via Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
Sergei Magnitsky in 2006.

The restrictions, put in place without official notification to the Russians, nevertheless represent a significant act of American pressure over the rights abuses and the impunity in the judicial system in Russia. At the same time, the disclosure appeared calibrated to protect hard-won improvements in the “reset” of relations between the two countries.

A State Department memo laid out the visa ban, which was first reported by The Washington Post. The document was sent last week to senators who have been pushing for far more stringent measures. Their provisions would not only deny American entry to Russian officials linked to the case of the lawyer, Sergei L. Magnitsky, but also freeze their American assets. At least 19 senators are sponsoring the bill, including Benjamin L. Cardin, Democrat of Maryland, and John McCain, Republican of Arizona.

The measure would apply as well to officials implicated in the shooting deaths of Natalia Estemirova, a human rights worker killed in the North Caucasus in 2009, and Anna Politkovskaya, a crusading journalist killed at the entry to her Moscow apartment in 2006.

The State Department’s memo argued against such sweeping measures, saying they might undermine Mr. Obama’s policy of reset with Moscow and that the Russians had threatened retaliation that could harm American interests around the world.

The Senate measure would “have foreign policy implications that could hurt our international sanctions efforts on countries like Iran, North Korea and Libya, and jeopardize other areas of cooperation including transit to Afghanistan,” the memo said.

Russian official reaction was muted on Tuesday.

Mikhail Fedotov, the head of President Dmitri A. Medvedev’s human rights council, said the prosecution of Mr. Magnitsky’s killers should be left to the Russian government. “We understand the noble goals,” he said, according to Interfax. “But one also needs to see possible unpleasant consequences.”

While accounts of human rights abuses are rife in Russia, Mr. Magnitsky’s case stood out because of the brazenness of the abuse, the scale of the venality and because this victim, unlike most, had powerful friends outside of Russia. European countries have been considering visa bans to officials linked to the case.

Mr. Magnitsky had testified in court that senior police officials had stolen documents from the hedge fund he worked for, Hermitage Capital, and used them in an elaborate fraud to take possession of $230 million in tax refunds. Later, the same police officers he had accused arrested him and ordered him held in dank cells, where for 11 months he was repeatedly denied medical care as his health faltered.

He died in November 2009, at 37. Earlier this month, Russia’s top investigative commission said he died of heart disease and hepatitis, and that he would have survived with medical care. However, a nearly simultaneous Russian presidential advisory report said he may have died because of a beating.

Over time, some prison officials were dismissed and got jobs elsewhere. And while the authorities have also occasionally raised the prospect of a more thorough investigation, they have ignored extensive evidence linking senior police officials to Mr. Magnitsky’s death. Some of those involved even received medals.

In its memo the State Department said the visa restrictions cover Russian officials whose names were provided by Hermitage Capital, which has lobbied the United States and European nations for sanctions.

An administration official said all the names were vetted, and that American diplomats later added more, according to a senior American official.

William Browder, the chief executive of Hermitage Capital, said he welcomed the news of the visa ban but said he would continue advocating for the Senate to pass the Sergei Magnitsky Rule of Law Accountability Act.

“Are we really resetting relations with this country if they are threatening to halt international cooperation in order to allow their torturers and murders to travel to America?” Mr. Browder said in a telephone interview from London.

A Senate staff member familiar with the draft legislation said discussions have been under way in Congress about a deal at the nexus of trade, human rights and diplomacy with the Russians.

Under this arrangement, Congress would agree to the administration’s request to abrogate the Jackson-Vanik admendment, an earlier human rights law intended to address first the Soviet Union and then Russia, in exchange for Mr. Obama’s signature on the Magnitsky act.

The Jackson-Vanik amendment imposed trade sanctions on countries restricting emigration, and was intended in part to ease the exit of Soviet Jews to Israel. It remains on the books for Russia though the country abolished exit restrictions two decades ago.

The law also violates World Trade Organization rules, and will need to be repealed if Russia becomes a member, something the United States government has advocated for years, to boost exports to Russia by companies like Procter & Gamble and Caterpillar.

The Senate aide, who was not authorized to speak publicly, said the administration’s acknowledgment of the visa ban list might not be sufficient to persuade the Senate to repeal Jackson-Vanik without passing the Magnitsky law. The list, he said, failed to expressly prohibit entry into the United States of suspected rights abusers in other Russian cases, he said, and fell short of the more punishing measure of seizing assets.

“Will this be enough to get Jackson-Vanik?” the aide said. “I don’t think so. This is a welcome development. But what about Natalia Estemirova? What about other gross human rights abuses in Russia?”

A version of this article appeared in print on July 27, 2011, on page A7 of the New York edition with the headline: Russians Tied To Jail Death Are Barred From the U.S… hairy women hairy woman https://zp-pdl.com/how-to-get-fast-payday-loan-online.php https://zp-pdl.com/get-a-next-business-day-payday-loan.php займ на карту без отказов круглосуточно

Dozens of Russian Officials Appear ‘On U.S. Blacklist’

The Moscow Times. By Nikolaus von Twickel

The United States has blacklisted dozens of Russian officials implicated in the prison death of lawyer Sergei Magnitsky, a U.S. media report said Tuesday.

The decision was revealed in comments from President Barack Obama’s administration to a Senate bill that calls for sanctions against officials accused of wrongdoing in the Magnitsky case and of other human rights violations, The Washington Post reported.

“Secretary [Hillary] Clinton has taken steps to ban individuals associated with the wrongful death of Sergei Magnitsky from traveling to the United States,” the report quoted the bill as saying, adding that the blacklist contained fewer than 60 names.

A U.S. Embassy spokeswoman refused to comment on the report Tuesday and referred all questions to the State Department in Washington, which did not immediately respond to a telephone request.

If confirmed, the United States would be the first country to impose sanctions in the Magnitsky case, a move that is subject to much controversy among Moscow’s Western partners.

A bill introduced by U.S. Senator Ben Cardin into Congress this spring proposes visa sanctions and the freezing of the U.S. assets of 60 Russian officials implicated in Magnitsky’s death.

But the bill, whose 18 co-sponsors include former Republican presidential contender John McCain and independent Joseph Lieberman, has so far only been referred to the Foreign Relations Committee, according to the Library of Congress web site.

Lawmakers in the European Parliament and in the Netherlands have called for similar sanctions, but no European government, let alone the European Union in Brussels, has taken up action.

Diplomats and analysts speculated Tuesday that the reported blacklist might just reflect an attempt to convince senators to abandon their bill, which they said poses serious risks to the “reset” in relations between Washington and Moscow. Others speculated that the U.S. administration was testing the waters while behind-the-scenes negotiations are ongoing.

According to the newspaper report, the Obama administration’s comment also says it has been warned by “senior Russian government officials that they will respond asymmetrically” by withdrawing cooperation on vital issues if the Senate legislation passes.

“Their argument is that we cannot expect them to be our partner in supporting sanctions against countries like Iran, North Korea and Libya, and sanction them at the same time,” the administration is quoted as saying.

Masha Lipman, an analyst with the Carnegie Moscow Center, said both Washington and Moscow had a strong interest in keeping the reset alive and therefore a compromise should be possible. “I suggest that this is not the end of the day,” she said by telephone.

Lipman noted that officials in Moscow have yet to comment on the report.

Foreign Ministry spokespeople did not pick up their phones Tuesday, and The Washington Post quoted an unidentified spokesperson as saying the ministry would respond to questions “perhaps not until later in the week.”

In an apparent tit-for-tat in response to both the Senate bill and the European initiatives, State Duma deputies last month announced a bill that would restrict entry, freeze assets and ban the business deals of foreigners deemed to have violated the rights of Russian citizens.

Maxim Rokhmistrov, first deputy chairman of the Liberal Democrat Party’s Duma faction, said that if proved true, the U.S. blacklist amounts to a “hostile move.”

The Duma bill on foreigners would be the “logical answer,” he told The Moscow Times, adding that he saw a good chance that the bill would be passed during the fall session.

Magnitsky, a lawyer for Hermitage Capital, was arrested on tax charges in 2008 after he accused senior Interior Ministry officials of embezzling $230 million of state money through tax refunds. He died of health problems in pretrial detention in November 2009.

His supporters, led by Hermitage founder Bill Browder, have waged a campaign against a group of law enforcement officers whom they accuse of torturing and killing Magnitsky.

While government officials have reacted furiously to the calls for sanctions, President Dmitry Medvedev has tried to allay fears by ordering the Kremlin’s human rights council to make an independent investigation.

Earlier this month, investigators opened a criminal case into two prison officials whom they accuse of negligence.

European diplomats said Tuesday that there was no majority in the EU to support Magnitsky sanctions because of fears that this would jeopardize the Kremlin’s efforts to solve the case.

“As long as these efforts continue, I do not see a reason to impose sanctions — which would be counter-productive,” said a senior diplomat from an EU member state, speaking on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the issue.

Denis Daniilidis, spokesman for the EU delegation in Moscow, said none of the EU’s 27 members should make any unilateral decisions in the case.

The issue has not yet been on the agenda of the Brussels council of ministers, he said.

Valery Borshchyov, a veteran trial lawyer who headed the investigation for the Kremlin’s human rights council, said that while he understands the EU’s fears, ultimately attention from abroad was the most important thing.

“The international attention to this case has already helped us a lot,” he told The Moscow Times. “It is what makes our government act.”

Meanwhile, Kommersant reported that a senior Interior Ministry investigator who worked on the Magnitsky case has been sacked. Natalya Vinogradova, deputy head of the tax fraud section of the ministry’s investigative department, seemingly failed her reattestation because her name is not on a document outlining the ministry’s new structure, the daily reported Tuesday, citing a copy of the document.

According to Magnitsky’s supporters, Vinogradova was the supervisor of Oleg Silchenko, the main investigator of the case. She appears among the 60 names listed in Cardin’s bill, according to the Russian-untouchables.com web site, which is run by Magnitsky’s supporters.

Read more: http://www.themoscowtimes.com/news/article/dozens-of-russian-officials-appear-on-us-blacklist/441182.html#ixzz1TIlQCz1o
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US tones down action on Russia

The Financial Times. By Charles Clover

The US state department has banned a number of Russian officials from entering the US, in a compromise aimed at heading off legislation that would have imposed broader sanctions on Moscow for human rights violations.

In a memo sent to selected US lawmakers who were sponsoring the legislation, known as the Magnitsky Act, the US administration sought to convince them that the bill was unnecessary, saying many of the Russian officials targeted were already ineligible for visas. The bill is named after Sergei Magnitsky, a Russian lawyer working for a US company who died in prison in 2009, but would ban Russian officials suspected in a number of other human rights violations.

“Secretary [Hillary] Clinton has taken steps to ban individuals associated with the wrongful death of Sergei Magnitsky from travelling to the United States” said the administration memo, which added that US law already prevented the state department from giving visas to individuals suspected of human rights violations.

Were the Magnitsky Act to pass, the Russian government had warned Washington that it would retaliate “asymmetrically”, possibly by slashing transit of Nato supplies to Afghanistan through Russian territory, or by ending co-operation on sanctions against Iran, North Korea and Libya, the US administration had warned legislators.

Moscow is understood to be concerned at the wide scope of the bill, which is aimed at Russian officials involved in torture, murder and wrongful detention in 22 other cases named in the text, which “illustrate the grave danger of exposing the wrongdoing of officials of the Government of the Russian Federation”, according to the text of the legislation.

The cases include those of journalist Oleg Kashin, who was beaten last year, Anna Politkovskaya, a reporter who was murdered in 2006, and human rights worker Natalia Estemirova, murdered in Chechnya in 2009.

The only Russian official named in the bill is Ramzan Kadyrov, the president of Chechnya, widely accused of human rights abuses. The bill has been expanded to include not just travel bans, but asset freezes as well.

Mr Magnitsky, who worked for Hermitage Capital, once the largest portfolio investor in Russia, was imprisoned in 2008 after he accused police officers of carrying out a $230m tax fraud, and refused to withdraw the charges. He died in November 2009 after nearly a year in prison, during which he was denied urgent medical care. Human rights groups say his treatment was tantamount to torture and murder by police.

A US congressional staff member said that the administration’s objections to the Magnitsky Act would be taken into account, but would not end their efforts to pass the bill. “This is more like likely to provoke discussion of the bill than to end it,” he said.
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US visa blacklist after Russian lawyer’s death: report

AFP

WASHINGTON — The US State Department has put on a visa blacklist dozens of Russian officials connected to the death in prison of a young lawyer, the Washington Post reported Tuesday.

Lawyer Sergei Magnitsky, 37, who had been held in pre-trial detention in a complex fraud case for 11 months, died in the Matrosskaya Tishina jail in Moscow in 2009 in a tragedy that sparked international outrage.

Magnitsky’s supporters have contended top officials deliberately neglected his health in a bid to effectively silence the lawyer and a Kremlin rights council this month said a top investigator and prison chief were at fault.

The Post cited US administration documents as revealing the existence of the visa blacklist, and wrote that Secretary of State Hillary Clinton had taken steps to ban individuals associated with the Magnitsky’s death from traveling to the United States.

The Post wrote that Moscow, infuriated over meddling into what it says are its internal affairs, is threatening to curtail its cooperation on Iran, North Korea, Libya and the transit of supplies for Afghanistan.

Russia reacted furiously earlier this month when the Netherlands parliament voted in favour of a resolution imposing travel and economic sanctions against Russian officials linked to Magnitsky’s death.

Russia’s Investigative Committee said this month it has opened criminal probes against the doctor and deputy head of the Butyrskaya prison in Moscow where Magnitsky had been held for several months.

But the top officials cited as being at fault in the report of the council which advises President Dmitry Medvedev on rights issues have not been prosecuted.

Magnitsky, a lawyer for Western investment fund Hermitage Capital, had before his arrest accused top interior ministry officials of a scheme to fraudulently claim more than $200 million (140 million euros) in returns on taxes.

And it was the same police investigators who led the case against him, charging him with the very crimes he had reported.
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US slaps travel restrictions on 60 Russian officials accused of ties to killing of lawyer

The Washington Post. By Associated Press

WASHINGTON — The Obama administration says that it has imposed travel restrictions on 60 Russian officials suspected of involvement in the imprisonment and killing of a lawyer.

Sergey Magnitsky died in late 2009 after spending almost a year in jail. He was awaiting trial on tax-evasion charges linked to his work with a U.S.-born investor barred from Russia because of allegations he was a security risk.

.Some U.S. lawmakers have been pushing for legislation that would impose a travel ban and asset freeze on the 60 Russians who they believe to be involved in Magnitsky’s persecution.

Online:
Russian officials targeted for U.S. travel restrictions: http://1.usa.gov/ppuYh6
Copyright 2011 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

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U.S. Imposes Visa Bans On Russian Officials Connected To Magnitsky Death

Radio Free Europe Radio Liberty. By Richard Solash, Irina Lagunina

The United States has imposed visa bans on Russian officials connected to the 2009 prison death of lawyer Sergei Magnitsky, whose case that has come to symbolize corruption and the state of human rights in Russia.

In doing so, the administration of President Barack Obama looks to heed lawmakers’ calls for Washington to take action, while minimizing potential damage to the ‘reset’ of relations with Moscow.

The announcement was made quietly to Congressmen in the administration’s written reaction to a Senate bill that seeks broader sanctions — both visa bans and asset freezes — against the officials. The bill would also pave the way for the United States to take similar action in other cases, and has provoked the ire of Moscow.

A Congressional source familiar with the matter told RFE/RL that the administration statement said, “[U.S.] Secretary [of State Hillary] Clinton has taken steps to ban individuals associated with the wrongful death of Sergei Magnitsky from traveling to the United States.”

It specified that the individuals are “already flagged in the visa adjudication system used by visa officers.”

Looking For Justice

Citing senior U.S. officials, “The Washington Post” says the blacklist does not cover all 60 people indentified as responsible in the Senate bill.

That list was first compiled with the help of William Browder, the CEO of investment firm Hermitage Capital, which Magnitsky represented.

Since the lawyer’s death, and while the top officials on the list remain unpunished at home, Browder has led a campaign to seek justice outside of Russia.

“I think at this point, there is nothing [Russia] can do to avoid sanctions of people who are involved in torture and murder,” Browder told RFE/RL’s Russian Service after learning of the visa bans.

“I think that what they can do in terms of not having this happen in any other case is to clean up their judicial system and prosecute all these people. I mean, it is absurd that the United States says, ‘These people are torturers and murderers, they can’t come into our country.’ And in Russia, these same people are being promoted and given state honors and with no consequence at all to their crime.”

In 2008, Magnitsky was arrested after implicating top officials from Russia’s Interior Ministry, Federal Security Service, and other agencies in a complex scheme to defraud the government of $230 million.

He died in 2009 after nearly a year in pre-trial detention, during which he was repeatedly denied medical care. A report on Magnitsky’s death issued this month by the Kremlin’s human rights council said the lawyer had also been severely beaten before dying.

Amid international outrage, Russian President Dmitry Medvedev sacked 20 prison officials after Magnitsky’s death. Last week authorities launched criminal investigations against two others. However, the top officials implicated by Magnitsky have been given promotions.

Friends and relatives pay their last respects to Magnitsky at his November 2009 funeral.Interests To Balance

Matthew Rojansky, the deputy director of the Russia and Eurasia Program at the Carnegie Endowment, a Washington think tank, says the Obama administration is carefully balancing its interests in issuing the visa bans.

He says the move may be a way to take the Magnitsky issue “out of Congress’s hands,” and as a result, avoid additional damage that the more far-reaching Senate bill could inflict on the ‘reset.’

“[The administration feels it] doesn’t need Congress to tell it who to put on a visa ban list; It can do that itself. It didn’t like the notion that these things were supposed to be made public, because, of course, that’s not U.S. policy — we don’t make visa ban names public,” said Rojansky. “And generally, it doesn’t like the notion that Congress is going to be running its Russia policy at a sensitive time in the relationship.”

Rojansky says that by quietly imposing the visa bans, and perhaps on only some of the officials listed in the Senate bill, the administration is taking action without making it a “blunt instrument against Russia.”

Russian opposition to the Senate bill was on full display in June, when lawmakers in Moscow introduced a retaliatory bill into the Duma that would ban visas and freeze assets of foreigners deemed to have violated the rights of Russian citizens.

More ominously, “The Washington Post” quotes the administration’s announcement of the visa bans as saying: “Senior Russian government officials have warned us that they will respond asymmetrically if this [Senate] legislation passes. Their argument is that we cannot expect them to be our partner in supporting sanctions against countries like Iran, North Korea, and Libya, and sanction them at the same time.”

The statement adds that Russian cooperation on the transit of supplies to Afghanistan could also be jeopardized by passage of the “Sergei Magnitsky Rule of Law Accountability Act.”

It remains to be seen whether that warning, coupled with the visa ban, is enough to dilute strong bipartisan support for the bill.

Rojansky also notes that the administration must win the support of Congress in order to remove trade restrictions on Russia and allow it to join the World Trade Organization — a move Obama has vowed to pursue as the next step in the ‘reset.’

The administration could be wagering, Rojansky says, that enacting the visa bans will win some lawmakers’ support.

More To Come?

Those considerations aside, Hermitage Capital’s Browder says the U.S. move sets a precedent for the European Union, Canada, the Netherlands, and others to follow.

“We’ve been in touch with a number of other countries all over Europe and I would expect that because the United States has done this, it gives everybody else the confidence to do it as well,” he said.

“And you’ll see many other countries doing this. I don’t think that these 60 people who killed Sergei Magnitsky or were involved in this terrible crime will be able to travel much other than to really uncivilized places in the future.”

Moscow has not yet commented on the visa ban.

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US Slaps Travel Ban on Russians Suspected in Magnitsky Death

Voice of America.

The U.S. State Department has imposed a travel ban on dozens of Russian officials suspected of involvement in the death of imprisoned lawyer Sergei Magnitsky.

Magnitsky was arrested in 2009 for what his supporters say were phony tax evasion charges. He died almost one year later at age 37 after prison authorities withheld medical care and possibly life-saving surgery.

U.S. law requires the State Department to deny visas to anyone accused of human rights violations, including torture.

Some U.S. Senators wanted much harsher sanctions against the Russians.

Magnitsky worked for a U.S.-owned investment fund in Russia. He accused Russian police officials of stealing fund documents as part of a scheme to pocket hundreds of millions of dollars.

Those same police officials arrested Magnitsky, charging him with tax evasion. He spent nearly one year in jail in poor health, constantly denied the care which could have saved his life.

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