The Sergei Magnitsky Act and Human Rights
Senators Ben Cardin (D–MD) and Jon Kyl (R–AZ) have joined together to sponsor a modern piece of human rights legislation, the Sergei Magnitsky Rule of Law Accountability Act.
The legislation is designed to punish gross violators of human rights while allowing the U.S. to extend permanent normal trade relations (PNTR) to Russia.
Sergei Magnitsky was a 37-year-old attorney and accountant who worked for Hermitage, then the largest Western private equity fund in Russia. In the course of his work, he uncovered a giant corruption scheme that involved embezzlements of $230 million from the Russian Treasury by law enforcement and tax officials. After making accusations, he was arrested on fabricated tax evasion and tax fraud charges.
Magnitsky died in isolation at a Russian prison, where he was denied medical care and beaten mercilessly by guards, as confirmed by an investigation by the Russian Presidential Council on Human Rights.
Although the Magnitsky Act is targeted toward human rights abuses in Russia, Cardin and Kyl would apply the act to major human rights violators based in all countries.
Congress should extend PNTR to Russia so the U.S. can benefit from that country’s recent admission to the World Trade Organization. This would mean that Russia would no longer be subject to the Jackson–Vanik Amendment, an important tool for promoting human rights during the Cold War that is no longer relevant in the 21st century.
Replacing the Jackson–Vanik Amendment with the Magnitsky Act would more effectively encourage Russia—and other countries that systematically abuse human rights—to respect the rights of their citizens. займ онлайн на карту без отказа hairy girl zp-pdl.com https://zp-pdl.com/emergency-payday-loans.php займ срочно без отказов и проверок
Bill sustains fight against human-rights abuses
In 2008, a young Russian attorney chose to do something courageous. That man, Sergei Magnitsky, took the daring — and in his country, unprecedented — step of publicly exposing a vast web of corruption and tax fraud presided over by some of Russia’s most senior officials. Those authorities, stung by his insolence, quickly arranged for Magnitsky to be tossed in jail on trumped-up charges. Over the course of a year, he was beaten, tortured and denied medical treatment; he ultimately died on Nov. 16, 2009.
Magnitsky could then have become just another statistic, another smothered voice for freedom, another example of the corrupt prevailing over the crusading.
Fortunately, that did not happen. Magnitsky’s story found a voice through a diverse coalition of human-rights activists, business leaders, academics, think tank scholars and journalists — a coalition that helped inspire us to draft bipartisan Senate legislation that would hold accountable officials from all over the world who disregard basic human rights, who fail to uphold the rule of law and who unjustly jail, abuse and murder whistle-blowers like Magnitsky.
Indeed, despite our differences on other issues, we both agree on the need for this so-called Magnitsky bill.
The United States has long been a global leader in the fight against corruption and human-rights abuses, and there is broad, bipartisan support in Congress for continuing to honor that important tradition. However, even as the House and Senate have begun to advance versions of this legislation as part of a comprehensive legislative package to grant normal trade relations to Russia (and in so doing, repeal Cold War-era Jackson-Vanik sanctions), a key difference has emerged between the two bills: While our Senate bill would hold these types of officials accountable no matter where they might prey, the House’s version would deal only with Russian authorities.
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Dreier: Support Russia trade bill even though Putin is ‘not a good guy’
House Rules Committee Chairman David Dreier (R-Calif.), who will retire at the end of the 112th Congress, called on his colleagues Tuesday to support a Russia trade bill up this week even though Russian President Vladimir Putin is “not a good guy.”
“Vladimir Putin is not a good guy,” Dreier said on the House floor. “Vladimir Putin has inflicted horrendous human rights policies on the people of Russia, we’ve seen crony capitalism take hold.
“And that’s why it’s very important … that the United States of America be at the table as part of the WTO’s effort to force Russia to live with the rules-based trading system.”
The House this week is expected to pass H.R. 6156, a bill giving Russia permanent normal trade relations (PNTR) status with the United States. This status is needed if the U.S. is to benefit from the trade concessions Russia agreed to when it joined the World Trade Organization over the summer.
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From Russia with relevance
Sputnik Theatre Company specialises in bringing new Russian work to London. Next month it unravels the story of lawyer Sergei Magnitsky, who died in detention after suing Putin’s government, director Noah Birksted-Breen tells Oliver Poole.
Ask people their knowledge of Russian theatre and it is likely to begin and end with Anton Chekhov. A few may cite the works of Maxim Gorky, Mikhail Bulgakov or even Alexander Ostrovsky — but knowledge of the contemporary scene is largely non-existent.
London director Noah Birksted-Breen hopes to help correct this omission with his debut of One Hour Eighteen Minutes, one of the most relevant of modern Russian plays, in London this month.
“People generally don’t know much about Russia here,” he says. “Hopefully those who come will know more than before. Ever since 2005, there has been a tremendous number of new plays and many of them, like this one, address what is happening now.”
One Hour Eighteen Minutes is certainly set in the contemporary Russia of Pussy Riot and crackdowns on opposition protesters familiar to London audiences from watching the evening news.
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Fund file: Bullish on Russia?
Investors should look before they leap into investing in Russia, according to a report in Monday’s FTfm, but it is very unlikely that many will do so.
On the face of it, huge strides that have been made in the last year or so will make Russia a more friendly place for overseas investors.
“Right now we’re going through a period of moderate liberalisation,” says Jan Dehn, chief strategist with Ashmore, an emerging markets specialist.
He can see evidence of this in recent measures to allow greater flexibility of the rouble and in moves to encourage foreign ownership of local currency bonds. Until recently, he explains, foreign ownership of rouble-denominated Russian sovereign debt was about 3 per cent. It is now 5.4 per cent and Dehn expects the proportion to rise to something closer to the emerging market average, which is 20 per cent.
There is also a ministry of finance proposal that will require any listed company with majority state ownership to pay out 25 per cent of its profits in dividends to shareholders from next year. By next year, also, Russian companies will have to follow IFRS international accounting standards.
Small wonder that Dehn, along with many other emerging market fund managers, reports being overweight Russia.
Bill Browder, founder and chief executive of Hermitage Capital Management, thinks they have either foolish optimism or very short memories, or both.
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How Will Russia React to Obama, Round Two?
The question posed by my title doesn’t quite hit the mark. Just as one cannot really speak of a single “America”, there is no one “Russia” anymore but rather several Russias. But while each different Russia has its own interests, attitudes and moods, there is something that unites them all with respect to America: The United States is on all of their radars. All of the various Russias hope to use the United States and its policy to serve their own domestic agendas. (In contrast to this, Russia largely fell off America’s radar after the fall of the Soviet Union.)
How, then, will the various Russia’s react to the renewed Obama presidency? Let’s start with the official Russia—that is, Vladimir Putin’s Kremlin. Along with David Kramer, I have already discussed what the Russian establishment and Putin’s regime could have expected from either possible election result on November 6. I will only add here a couple of brushstrokes to that landscape now that we know the results of the election. Moscow’s official rhetoric and actions over the past year—that is, after Putin officially returned to the Kremlin—allow us to conclude that the Kremlin’s position on the United States would have been based on the following premises no matter who America hired as boss in the White House:
• America is weak. It is teetering on a “fragile foundation” and will continue to decline. The United States today can no longer continue as a world leader, and its ongoing fall from grace will give Russia more room to maneuver on the global scene.
• America needs Russia more than Russia needs America. The United States needs Russian help on Iran, Afghanistan, Syria, Central Asia, nuclear issues and counterbalancing China. All of these issues put the Kremlin in a stronger bargaining position with respect to Washington.
• America’s decline and European stagnation demonstrate that liberal democracy is in crisis. This fact justifies the Kremlin’s decision to return to the idea that Russia represents a “unique civilizational model.”
• America is bogged down by domestic problems. It is turning its focus inward, thus making it less prepared to react to the Kremlin’s turn toward repression. Moscow can dismiss Washington’s criticism; its bark is worse than its bite.
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House to vote on Russia trade
The House next week is expected to pass legislation that would give Russia permanent normal trade relations (PNTR) status, which would allow the United States to benefit from Russia’s August accession to the World Trade Organization (WTO).
The House Rules Committee announced Friday that it will hold a meeting on Tuesday to approve a rule that governs floor consideration of the bill, H.R. 6156. That implies that the House will start work on the bipartisan measure as early as Wednesday, and complete it by the end of the week.
The bill removes Russia from the Jackson-Vanik rule, which requires the U.S. to review the trade status of some countries annually, and grant temporary normal trade status based on the emigration policies of the listed countries.
But WTO members are required to give each other permanent trade status, and failing to grant PNTR to Russia would mean the U.S. cannot benefit from the concessions Russia made when it joined the WTO.
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Fight For Justice Continues For Murdered Russian Lawyer
Sergei Magnitsky was a Russian lawyer investigating state corruption when he was imprisoned on fabricated charges by the ‘gangster regime’ of Vladimir Putin. Magnitsky suffered torturous treatment while in the custody of the Russian government who were attempting to force him into signing a false confession.
After 358 days of pre-trial incarceration, he died from a beating by prison guards on November 16, 2009, at the age of 37.
Since then his former employer, William Browder, has been on a mission to reveal to the world the truth about the imprisonment and death of Magnitsky and bring to justice those responsible for his murder. The quest has brought to light the deeply corrupt state of Russian politics and its ties with organised crime.
Browder is a co-founder of Hermitage Capital Management, a London-based investment firm which began trading in the Russian stock market during the 1990’s. Browder moved to Moscow during this time and was at first an advocate for Putin and his efforts to seemingly curb the plundering influence of oligarchs in the country.
However, Browder soon became aware that the Russian government under Putin was actually building its own criminal enterprise and merely channelling the former wealth of oligarchs into the private bank accounts of high-ranking officials.
Browder was publicly vocal in criticising these practices and began investigating the corrupt management of firms such as Gazprom, a state-controlled gas giant, and Surgutneftegaz, a secretive oil producer.
This quickly earned the ire of the Kremlin who launched a ruthless vendetta against Browder and Hermitage Capital.
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McFaul Not Keen on Visa Sanctions
In what may or may not be taken as a preview of U.S. policy toward Russia under President Barack Obama’s second term, Amb. Michael McFaul gave quite a tepid description of the Magnitsky Act to an Interfax journalist today:
Q.: The U.S. State Department’s approval of the ‘Magnitsky list’ has drawn an extremely harsh reaction from Moscow. Is it true that Washington may extend this list by putting on it officials involved in the Leonid Razvozzhayev and/or Pussy Riot cases?
A.: There is a fundamental misunderstanding about this issue. Let me try to clear it up. We have a presidential decree that’s built on a set of regulations that the State Department already had in place, the Bush administration put them in place, we then strengthened them under President Obama. And I can send you the link, so you could have it.
So the secretary of state and the State Department and the U.S. government, the executive branch of the government is already empowered by President Obama to deny visas to all individuals from all over the world, not just Russia, if we assessed that they have grossly violated human rights of individuals. It’s already in place. And it is a long, long list, by the way. There is a notion that it’s just about this one case, just about Russia. It’s a misconception. So the powers to do that are already in place. What we don’t do is we don’t publish these lists. There is a reason for that. Because we believe in the rule of law. You do not have a right according to the American constitution to come to my country. It is not your right, according to our constitution. It’s a privilege. Just the same it is a privilege for Americans to come to Russia. And your government gets to decide who comes to and who doesn’t. By the way I think you decided that Mr. Browder can’t come to your country, the Russian government decided. It is the sovereign right of every country. займ на карту срочно без отказа hairy girl https://zp-pdl.com/best-payday-loans.php https://zp-pdl.com/get-quick-online-payday-loan-now.php займ срочно без отказов и проверок
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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
