French ‘Magnitsky Act’ Is Gaining Momentum
As French President Francois Hollande met with President Vladimir Putin on Thursday, he was under serious pressure to raise the case of whistle-blowing lawyer Sergei Magnitsky, whose mysterious death in a Moscow jail led the U.S. to impose sanctions on Russians suspected of human rights violations.
A survey published Thursday by the independent French Institute of Public Opinion (IFPO), one of the country’s most respected pollsters, revealed that 85 percent of French citizens would support their own version of the sanction-imposing Magnitsky Act, which U.S. President Barack Obama signed into law in December.
Bill Browder, the man behind the US Magnitsky Act has been drumming up support in France to pass its own version of the legislation. Shortly after the American law was passed Russia banned U.S. adoptions of Russian orphans in what was widely seen as a tit-for-tat response.
“Now that the U.S. Magnitsky Act has been passed, it’s our major priority to get the Europeans to the same level within a year,” Browder said in an interview in Paris earlier this month.
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Magnitsky relatives: Russian diplomat lied to EU parliament
The mother and widow of Sergei Magnitsky, a Russian anti-corruption activist who died in prison, have accused a Russian diplomat of lying to the European Parliament about his case.
The women – Natalia Magnitskaya and Natalia Zharikova – spoke out in a letter on 25 February to the parliament’s subcommittee on human rights.
They said that Konstantin Dolgov, the Russian foreign ministry’s special envoy on human rights, misled MEPs at a hearing in Brussels on 20 February when he told them that Magnitsky’s own relatives want him to be tried posthumously in order to clear his name.
According to a transcript of the hearing, Dolgov said: “The court cannot close the case unless the relatives, or people who represent the interests of the deceased, make it clear that they are not against the closing of the case. The relatives of Mr Magnitsky made it absolutely clear that they are against closing the case without his acquittal.”
Russian authorities accused Magnitsky, an accountant, of financial fraud after he exposed a scam by tax officials to embezzle hundreds of millions of euros from the Russian treasury.
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Magnitsky Relative Summoned for Questioning by Police
Police summoned for questioning a family member of former Hermitage Capital lawyer Sergei Magnitsky, who died in a Moscow prison over three years ago, the company’s press service said Wednesday.
“The family member summoned as a witness was asked to ‘arrive for questioning’ at the Interior Ministry’s investigative department on Gazetny Pereulok, where Sergei Magnitsky was taken for questioning over four years ago, on Nov. 24, 2008,” Interfax cited Hermitage Capital’s press office as saying.
The company did not disclose the name of the relative or what criminal case he was due to be questioned over.
The Interior Ministry did not officially comment on the matter.
Sergei Magnitsky, a former lawyer of the Hermitage Capital fund and partner of the British law firm Firestone Duncan Ltd., was arrested on suspicion of fraud and tax evasion on Nov. 24, 2008.
A month before his arrest, Magnitsky had presented evidence against two police officials, implicating them in a tax fraud scheme in which Magnitsky said $230 million was stolen from the Russian budget.
He died on Nov. 16, 2009 in a Moscow prison, where, according to a Kremlin human rights council investigation, he was badly beaten by guards shortly before he died.
His death has not only damaged Russia’s image abroad and strained ties with the United States, but also prompted the Magnitsky Act, controversial U.S. legislation passed last December that imposes sanctions on Russian officials accused of human rights abuses. buy over the counter medicines займы на карту срочно https://zp-pdl.com/best-payday-loans.php zp-pdl.com buy viagra online
Russia denies visa for leading congressional human-rights advocate
The Russian government has denied a visa for a prominent congressman in what that the lawmaker believes is clear retaliation for U.S. efforts to punish Russian human rights violators.
Rep. Chris Smith (R-NJ), the chairman of the House Foreign Affairs subcommittee on human rights, has been traveling to Russia and before that the Soviet Union for decades. But this month, the Russian government denied him a visa for the first time, despite a personal intervention from the U.S. ambassador in Moscow.
In an interview Wednesday with The Cable, Smith said the Russians were already retaliating for a recent U.S. law that seeks to call out and punish Russian human rights violators. That bill, the Sergei Magnitsky Accountability and Rule of Law Act of 2012, was named after the Russian anti-corruption lawyer who died in prison, allegedly after being tortured by Russian officials.
Smith was an original sponsor of the bill.
“The Magnitsky bill is the reason I didn’t get the visa. This is the first time,” Smith said. “I was shocked. During the worst days of the Soviet Union I went there repeatedly.”
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Magnitsky Act sponsor is denied Russian visa
Despite having traveled to Russia before and intervention of the U.S. Ambassador to Russia, Congressman Chris Smith was denied a Russian visa.
U.S. Congressman Chris Smith (Republican-New Jersey), chairman of the House of Representatives Foreign Affairs subcommittee on human rights, has been denied a Russian visa.
According to Smith, he had previously traveled to the Soviet Union and Russia, but in February 2013 he was denied a visa, despite intervention by U.S. Ambassador to Russia Michael McFaul. The congressman said that no reason has been given; however, Russian Ambassador to the US Sergei Kislyak reportedly said that the decision had been made in Moscow, not at the Russian Embassy in Washington.
Smith believes the refusal was retaliation for the passing of the Magnitsky Act. Nevertheless, the congressman plans to reapply for a visa. He said he had previously been denied visas to China, Cuba and Belarus. He had planned to travel to Russia to discuss the Dima Yakovlev Law, which bans Americans from adopting Russian children and was passed partially in response to the Magnitsky Act. Smith said he shared the legitimate concerns of the Russian officials and had prepared a resolution highlighting the death of 19 Russian children adopted by American parents.
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Tycoon presses for sanctions over torture and death of lawyer
A US businessman will meet Irish officials and testify before an Oireachtas committee today to press Ireland during the EU presidency for sanctions against Russian officials responsible for the torture and death of his lawyer Sergei Magnitsky, who blew the whistle on a $230 million fraud in 2008.
Bill Browder, the founder and chief executive of the London-based Hermitage Capital Management, is seeking justice for Mr Magnitsky who uncovered the fraud involving Russian state taxes paid by the firm.
The largest foreign investor in Russia, Mr Browder spent $4.5 billion on shares in Russian public companies until he was denied entry to Russia in 2005 and declared “a threat to national security” by the Russian government for exposing corruption in Russian firms.
After testifying against state officials, Mr Magnitsky was arrested and imprisoned without trial, then tortured in an attempt to force him to retract his testimony. He was held for almost a year in appalling conditions, including cells with 14 inmates and eight beds with sewage on the cell floor.
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Swiss TV News – Magnitsky Case (German)
Swiss TV News programme. Magnitsky Case
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‘Cloud Atlas,’ Russian style
A story needs a beginning and end, but what has become the main narrative of Russia’s current political era doesn’t seem to have either. And the weak are meat the strong do eat, as David Mitchell coined in his novel “Cloud Atlas.”
Sometime in 2005-2006, William Browder, an American investment fund manager, ran afoul of someone close to the Kremlin. He had thought that his friends in high places would support him as he greenmailed their enemies, but as an outsider he overestimated his standing, and Russian authorities revoked his visa. When he went to the top for help, help was refused, and his capital fund suddenly became fair game in a tax-fraud racket run by a group of tax officials.
When a lawyer, Sergei Magnitsky, blew the whistle on the racket, he was himself accused of tax fraud, jailed, and, in a maliciously lazy form of torture, denied medical treatment until he died.
Still barred from Russia, Browder (“I’ve spent every day thinking what I could have done that could have saved [Magnitsky’s] life,” he told me in November 2011) started lobbying hard in Washington to avenge Magnitsky’s death. American lawmakers, many of them desperate to appear hawkish during a presidential campaign, linked the bid to blacklist 60 Russian officials implicated in Magnitsky’s death to the longawaited repeal of the Jackson-Vanik Amendment, a 1974 trade restriction with the Soviet Union.
In December 2012, the Russia and Moldova Jackson-Vanik Repeal and Sergei Magnitsky Rule of Law Accountability Act of 2012 were passed by the U.S. Congress and signed into law. President Vladimir Putin, who had pushed for the Jackson-Vanik Repeal for years, was furious over the blacklist, as intended. Within days, Russian lawmakers came up with a tit-for-tat blacklist, adding a clause that banned the adoption of Russian orphans by Americans.
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In Putin’s Russia, Shooting the Messenger
WHAT is the difference between Dmitri A. Medvedev and Vladimir V. Putin, Russia’s tag-teaming presidents? It’s the difference between officially asking experts for unvarnished advice, and punishing those experts for giving it.
In early 2011, when Mr. Medvedev (now prime minister) was still president, the Kremlin’s human rights council selected nine experts to scrutinize the 2010 conviction of Mikhail Khodorkovsky, who was once one of Russia’s richest men but is now its best-known political prisoner. I was invited to serve, the one American in a group with six experts from Russia, one from Germany and one from the Netherlands. We did not mince our words criticizing the Khodorkovsky trial.
That December, Russian television showed the council’s chairman delivering our findings to Mr. Medvedev, with a recommendation that Mr. Khodorkovsky’s conviction be annulled. But then Mr. Putin, who was president from 2000 to 2008 and then bided his time as prime minister, returned to the presidency in May 2012. Since then, for their willingness to speak truth to power, at least four of my Russian counterparts have been questioned in connection with a criminal investigation. The court order used to harass them refers to their “deliberately false conclusions.” Talk about killing the messenger.
You may be surprised to learn that the Kremlin has a human rights agency. Not only has one existed since 1993, but the human rights council, as it is currently known, was active and respected under Mr. Medvedev’s presidency. Its membership was a who’s who of leading Russian human rights personalities, including Lyudmila M. Alexeyeva, the leader of the Moscow Helsinki Group and a former Soviet dissident.
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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
