Russia accuses US of using ‘cold war tactics’ over Magnitsky Act
Russia has accused the United States of engaging in cold war tactics and threatened tit-for-tat retaliation after the US Senate passed a bill banning Russian officials accused of human rights abuses from travelling to the country.
The US Senate on Thursday passed the Magnitsky Act, named after a Russian lawyer for London-based investor William Browder, who died in prison, as part of a bill that lifts Soviet-era trade restrictions on Russia. The bill, which must be signed by President Barack Obama before coming into force, includes a visa ban and asset freeze on those officials involved in Magnitsky’s death.
Sergei Lavrov, the Russian foreign minister, said after meeting Hillary Clinton, the US secretary of state, in Dublin late on Thursday that Russia would retaliate. “We will also close entry to Americans who are guilty of human rights violations,” he said.
Many Russians laughed off the threat, noting that the Russian propensity to keep assets and property in the US is not reciprocated. “And now they’ll shut down entry to Russia for some American officials who are involved, let’s say, in the death of Afghan kids. What are they going to do, cry?” Margarita Simonyan, the Kremlin-friendly head of Russia Today, the state-run international news channel, wrote on Twitter.
The Kremlin marshalled the Young Guard, the youth wing of the ruling United Russia party, to protest. The group held a protest in front of the US embassy in Moscow on Friday with the sign: “The US is a police state.”
Read More →
The Magnitsky Sanctions in Canada
The passage of the Magnitsky Act in the United States was not the end, but the beginning of the global campaign to ban human rights abusers from traveling to the West and using its financial systems. This week, the Canadian Parliament turned its attention to this issue, hearing the testimony from IMR Senior Advisor Vladimir Kara-Murza and Hermitage Capital CEO William Browder.
Less than a week after the U.S. Senate passed the Sergei Magnitsky Rule of Law Accountability Act, which imposes a targeted visa ban and asset freeze on Russian human rights abusers, the same subject was brought up for discussion at the Canadian Parliament. On December 11, the House of Commons Subcommittee on International Human Rights held a hearing on Magnitsky’s case in the context of the human rights situation in Russia. Testifying at the hearing were Vladimir Kara-Murza, a member of the Coordinating Council of the Russian Opposition and a senior policy advisor at the Institute of Modern Russia; and William Browder, the CEO at Hermitage Capital Management, the investment fund Sergei Magnitsky represented. The hearing was held with a full turnout of Subcommittee members.
“The tragic story of Sergei Magnitsky, whose only ‘crime’ was to stand against corruption, is symptomatic of the general situation in Vladimir Putin’s Russia, where state-sanctioned theft and extortion, politically motivated prosecutions, wrongful imprisonment, police abuse, media censorship, suppression of peaceful assembly, and election fraud have become norm,” Kara-Murza said at the hearing, pointing to the recent repressive laws on public rallies, NGOs and high treason, as well as to criminal cases against opposition activists as evidence that ,“if that is possible, the situation is growing worse.”
Read More →
Hitting Russia’s “crooks and abusers” where it hurts — in Canada
“It is only our task to bring democratic change to Russia,” says Russian opposition politician Vladimir Kara-Murza. “It’s for the democratic opposition. We don’t want or need outside actors to come in and do anything.”
But, says Kara-Murza, there is much that Western democracies such as Canada can do to help Russian democracy by passing legislation in their own countries.
Russia’s political elite routinely plunders the country of billions of dollars. They operate like organized criminals: protecting their own and murderously silencing those who expose them. They rule in the style of Zimbabwe or Belarus, says Kara-Murza, but prefer the West as a safe place to store their money, buy second homes, and send their children to school. And it is in the West where they are most vulnerable.
Kara-Murza was in Ottawa this week to urge Canada to pass a private member’s bill introduced by Liberal Member of Parliament Irwin Cotler. The proposed legislation would render inadmissible to Canada Russians who played a role in a particularly egregious example of Russian state pillage and brutality.
Sergei Magnitsky, a Russian lawyer, uncovered a $230 million tax fraud while working for Bill Browder, the American-born co-founder of Hermitage Capital Management. For the crime of exposing this theft and the Russian officials involved, Magnitsky was arrested, beaten, denied medical treatment, and died in police custody without ever facing trial. A Russian prison doctor was charged with negligence. But no senior officials have been punished. Russia isn’t ignoring the matter, though. It’s putting Magnitsky on trial posthumously.
Read More →
EU should impose entry ban on those incriminated in Magnitsky case
The Greens / European Free Alliance
Commenting on the report on Russia adopted today in plenary, Green MEP Werner Schulz, Vice-Chair of the EU-Russia Parliamentary Cooperation Committee, said:
“The adoption of this report shows that the European Parliament is as clear as ever that any cooperation with the Russian Federation must be conditional on the respect by Russia of democratic standards and compliance with fundamental human rights and the rule of law.
In his recent state of the nation speech, Vladimir Putin lamented the country’s so-called moral decline. At the same time a flood of restrictive and immoral laws maintain a stranglehold on civil society. Any hopes that the controversial president could loosen the reins of the “managed democracy” have faded.
The Members of the European Parliament supported my proposal by a large majority and called for immediate release of the detained members of the punk band Pussy Riot. I expect Commission President Barroso and Council President van Rompuy to repeat this demand to President Putin at the upcoming EU-Russia summit.
For years now Russia has been viewed and discussed as an indispensable strategic partner of the EU. But vast natural resources and exports of western technology and consumer goods have not led to any strategic cooperation. Corruption and arbitrary behaviour by the authorities are not consistently opposed, as in the case of the lawyer Magnitsky who dared to uncover a hugely complex network of corruption. Unlike the officials guilty of his death, he is still being persecuted, even posthumously. Visa liberalisation without binding human rights criteria is not acceptable. The European Union should impose an entry ban for all people incriminated in the Magnitsky-Case and should simultaneously facilitate visas for Russian citizens.” buy over the counter medicines срочный займ на карту онлайн https://zp-pdl.com/online-payday-loans-in-america.php https://zp-pdl.com/online-payday-loans-in-america.php hairy woman
Sergei Magnitsky: Quest for justice in Russian lawyer’s death begins to yield results
On the night of Nov. 16, 2009, a battered body was carried from an isolation cell in Moscow’s Matrosskaya Tishina prison. It was that of 37-year-old Sergei Magnitsky.
The young, upcoming tax lawyer had been held in some of Russia’s roughest prisons for a year, and according to records, tortured, locked up in inhuman conditions and denied medical aid when he suffered an agonizing pancreatic ailment.
“He was an idealist,” says his former employer William Browder. “He could have left the country, but he believed that Russian law would protect him. But there is no rule of law in Russia.”
Magnitsky’s “crime” was to blow the whistle on the largest tax fraud ever perpetrated in Russia, and he paid with his life.
Now Browder, once Russia’s biggest foreign investor, devotes his time and resources to seeking justice for Magnitsky. The quest has led to an international confrontation, landmark legislation on human rights, and an awareness that officials at the highest levels can be held accountable.
The U.S. Congress has just passed a Magnitsky Act that freezes the assets of 60 Russians linked with his death and bars them from entering the country: it spreads the net wider, to all those responsible for gross violations of human rights in Russia.
In Canada, Liberal MP Irwin Cotler is introducing a similar private member’s bill. Browder met this week with Public Safety Minister Vic Toews and Immigration Minister Jason Kenney. Other Western countries are watching closely.
Russia has retaliated furiously, passing a tit-for-tat bill to sanction Americans who commit human rights violations against Russians. It’s shaping up as the biggest chill in relations since the Cold War.
Read More →
Cardin stands up for rights
Maryland’s junior senator shows leadership by demanding Russian accountability for a politically linked death.
This month’s passage of a new U.S.-Russia trade law has done more than showcase Senator Ben Cardin’s dedication to international human rights.
By sending the shock to the Kremlin — that the U.S. values prosecuting rights abusers as much as it values profits for businesses — the Maryland Democrat has catapulted human rights atop the international agenda and brought new attention to the U.S. Helsinki Commission that he chairs.
The Helsinki Commission — founded amid the Cold War, just like the legislation the new trade bill replaces — once helped secure freedom for Soviet refuseniks unable to emigrate from under the thumb of Communism. Thirty years later, Mr. Cardin and the 21-member, bipartisan, congressional-executive body put the spotlight back on the Soviet region broadly and Moscow specifically.
I remember the June day in 2009 when Senator Cardin first heard about Sergei Magnitsky. Hermitage Capital Management CEO Bill Browder spoke of the raid on his office in Moscow and how Mr. Magnitsky, his 37-year-old lawyer, refused to lie about the trumped-up charges his client faced in Russia’s largest-ever tax fraud scheme, and how he suffered in prison for it. Mr. Cardin sat wide-eyed, imagining the story worthy of a movie.
What no one knew in the hearing room that day was that Mr. Magnitsky would die within five months, a tragic victim of either repeated medical inaction in prison or torture. (Is there a difference?)
Read More →
Avenging a whistleblower
The passage of the ‘Magnitsky list’ puts the US back on the moral high ground. What does ‘eastern Europe’ think about the new American administration? That was the question that CEPA, a Washington, DC think-tank where I am a non-resident fellow, set me last month.
My answer was “not much”. For a start, I argued that the idea of a homogenous ‘east European’ region of ardent Atlanticists is out of date. Only Poland and Estonia pay their real dues to NATO (spending 2% of gross domestic product on defence). They and a few other countries still have specific expectations of US military involvement in Europe, exemplified by NATO’s contingency planning and next year’s Steadfast Jazz exercise. This will defend a fictitious chunk of NATO from a fictitious adversary. It just happens to take place mostly in Poland and the Baltic states. But most countries when they think about the US do so as Europeans, not as ‘ex-communist countries’. Just like most Europeans, they want the US to be strong and friendly.
But expectations are modest. After 1989, the US was the single most important country for newly free Europe. Not any more. For those in search of an economic and political model, the Nordic countries offer the best example of dynamic capitalism and high-quality public services. The US is a friend, but for the most part a far-away and distracted one.
I pooh-poohed the US’s role a bit prematurely. It is true that the administration is not greatly focused on Europe. But the US is more than the administration. Congress has put the US back on the moral high ground, by passing a law containing the ‘Magnitsky list’.
Read More →
Squeezing the sleazy
Global anti-corruption efforts are growing in scope and clout. This year is set to be the best yet.
Impunity and euphemism used to be daunting obstacles for graft-busters. Not any more. International efforts are bearing fruit. New laws have raised the cost of wrongdoing. Financial markets are punishing corrupt companies. Most encouraging, activists have growing clout not only in high-profile cases but at grassroots level, where the internet helps to highlight instances of “quiet” (low-level) corruption.
The big international bodies dealing with corruption are making progress. A working group set up in 2010 by the G20 (the world’s largest economies) has done more than many observers expected, particularly in drawing up rules on seizure of corrupt assets and denial of visas to corrupt officials. Unlike the United Nations Convention Against Corruption, the G20 is not so far split between keen sleazebusters and countries like Russia and China. Another body, the Paris-based Financial Action Task Force, will start a fourth round of monitoring member states next year, chiefly for effectiveness in implementing anti-money-laundering laws.
Such efforts are “steady, slow boring stuff”, but still important, says Robert Palmer of Global Witness, a campaigning group. He notes that international discussions no longer tiptoe round the word “corruption”. A culture of denial has given way to at least lip-service to the cause.
The anti-graft laws of national governments are making progress too. America’s Foreign Corrupt Practices Act and Britain’s Bribery Act impose potentially savage penalties on firms that do business by sleazy means. That includes having weak in-house anti-corruption policies. The results are mixed. At a conference earlier this month in Prague organised by the Brookings Institution, an American think-tank, Thomas Firestone of the Moscow office of Baker & McKenzie, a law firm, said foreign managers trying to penalise bribery with dismissal face tough Russian laws that hamper such firings. Perversely, the most corrupt employees can thus gain hefty severance payments. Such clashes between local and international laws abound.
Read More →
Bar Russian Murder Suspects, says Cotler
Tax attorneys make unlikely heroes, but Sergei Magnitsky died a horrible death at the age of 37, refusing to recant his assertion of a massive fraud in Russia.
Magnitsky spent his final days at the same prison that once held Raoul Wallenberg, a Swedish hero credited with rescuing as many as 100,000 Jews from the Nazis only to be imprisoned by the Soviets on suspicion of espionage.
Like Wallenberg, Magnitsky is being remembered as a man of principle who stood by his sense of right and wrong at great personal cost.
Several years ago, Bill Browder, CEO of Hermitage Capital Management, and his associates discovered that Russian companies they had invested in had bilked the Russian government for $230 million in taxes paid by Hermitage.
Exposing the fraud got Browder barred from Russia, but his lawyer, Magnitsky, paid a higher price. He was jailed, mistreated, and killed in November 2009. He was denied medical treatment for a severe pancreatic condition he developed while held in the infamous Butyrka prison.
Like Wallenberg, Magnitsky is being remembered as a man of principle who stood by his sense of right and wrong at great personal risk.
Browder said the fact that the Russian government would attack people for exposing tax fraud shows that corruption had reached the highest levels of the government.
Read More →
-
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
