Posts Tagged ‘borshchev’
Russia rules Magnitsky was not abused
Russian authorities, showing no signs of declaring a truce with critics at home or abroad, took a swipe at both Tuesday by ruling that no crime was committed in the death of Sergei Magnitsky, a lawyer whose treatment prompted the U.S. Congress to impose sanctions on corrupt officials here.
The finding by the country’s top investigative body contradicted those of a Russian presidential commission, which concluded that Magnitsky was abused and denied medical treatment before his death, and a private investigation by his Western employer, which found evidence he had been tortured.
“He was beaten,” Valery Borshchev, a member of the presidential commission, told the Interfax news agency Tuesday. “There is a death certificate stating that he had sustained a closed head injury.”
Borshchev said he would demand a new investigation. “This defiant act threatens basic and fundamental human rights in Russia,” he said.
Human rights and other nongovernmental organizations have been uneasily waiting to find out how they will fare in this environment. A law requiring groups that receive funds from abroad to register as foreign agents went into effect in November. Last month, President Vladimir Putin reminded the authorities that it should be enforced, according to news reports.
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Seeking guilty in Russian whistleblower’s death
If the legal system here worked, a 75-page report titled “The Torture and Murder of Sergei Magnitsky and the Coverup by the Russian Government” would be submitted to a court of law. Instead, it is being delivered Monday to the court of international opinion.
The report, full of links to official documents and the result of a thousand man-hours of work, comes not from officers of the law but an American-born businessman who is convinced that Russian officials are getting away with murder.
William F. Browder, who runs an investment firm based in London, has taken on the role of virtual prosecutor in the death of Sergei L. Magnitsky, who died at the age of 37 in police custody because of his work as a tax adviser to Browder’s Hermitage Capital Management when it operated in Russia.
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Laws to rein in Russia’s pretrial detention system are ignored
Over the last 18 months, President Dmitry Medvedev has signed two laws meant to rein in Russia’s notorious pretrial detention system, an institution often used to extract bribes and enforce widespread corruption. He has been trying to make the country more governable and conducive to business.
Medvedev sought to discourage police, prosecutors and judges from throwing businesspeople into jail on false charges, often in return for bribes from competitors bent on destroying a rival.
But the system quickly proved itself more powerful than the president. The laws were ignored. Yet another of Medvedev’s promised reforms would go unkept, and Russians would remain fearful of their courts and police.
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Dead Before Trial
Two Deaths in Pretrial Detention Show that Little Has Changed Since the Magnitsky Case.
Andrei Kudoyarov, a former principal of a school in Moscow, was facing 12 years in prison for attempting to solicit bribes, when he died of a massive heart attack in a Moscow pretrial detention center last week. With an eye to the drawn-out investigation and international furor over the earlier death of Firestone Duncan lawyer Sergei Magnitsky, investigators responded quickly by opening an inquiry into the death on Tuesday. Yet when a second prisoner in a Russian pretrial detention center died on the same day, rights activists cried foul, claiming that substandard care in detention centers has led to an “epidemic” of prisoner deaths.
Kudoyarov was arrested in May on charges that he had taken a bribe of 240,000 rubles in exchange for giving a student a spot in the first grade at Moscow School 1308. Other parents came forward with similar claims, some voiced as recently as this week, yet Kudoyarov’s lawyers and many at the school continued to claim he had been set up. It all became moot when he died on Saturday in pretrial detention of a fatal heart attack. An article published in Moskovsky Komsolets claimed he waited 43 minutes for an ambulance to arrive at the scene.
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Aleksanyan’s Death ‘Practically Murder’
Human rights activists said former Yukos vice president Vasily Aleksanyan, who died this week of AIDS-related illnesses, would have lived longer if the authorities had not kept him in prison for nearly three years on politically tainted charges.
Aleksanyan, who fought a protracted legal battle with the authorities before finally being freed on bail in 2009 to seek medical treatment, died at home Monday at the age of 39.
“It was practically a murder,” rights champion Valery Borshchyov told Business FM radio on Tuesday. “He could have lived longer if he had not been kept in detention.”
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After Magnitsky, Prison Doctors Ordered to Check Inmates
Chastened by the Kremlin and the international community after the death of lawyer Sergei Magnitsky, the Justice Ministry has ordered prison doctors to check the health of prisoners being punished with solitary confinement.
The decree outlines the procedures for the medical check, which is already required under the law. Human rights activists warned that little would change in prisons as a result, saying prison doctors are dependent on prison wardens, who, in turn, are biased in their treatment of prisoners.
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Russia: Charges against Magnitskiy case doctors see mixed response
Medical officers Larisa Litvinova and Dmitriy Kratov from the Butyrka pre-trial detention centre have been charged with the manslaughter of Hermitage Capital fund lawyer Sergey Magnitskiy, the privately-owned Interfax news agency reported on 12 August. They are said to have been negligent in providing care to Magnitskiy before his transfer to the Matrosskaya Tishina remand centre, where he later died.
Litvinova and Kratov were among those identified by rights activists as being complicit in Magnitskiy’s death. The Russian rights activists, who were involved in the independent probe, have not responded with a great deal of enthusiasm, expressing concern that charges against Litvinova and Kratov will become something of a smoke screen.
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Russia charges doctors over jail death
Russia has charged two doctors at a Moscow prison with causing the 2009 death in pre-trial detention of lawyer Sergei Magnitsky, a tragedy that ignited global outrage, investigators say.
The Investigative Committee said on Friday it had “established a direct link between Magnitsky’s death and actions of the doctors in the prison” and had charged prison doctors Larisa Litvinova and Dmitry Kratov.
Litvinova is charged with causing death by negligence and if convicted could face up to three years in prison.
Kratov, who holds the senior post of deputy prison director, is charged with carelessness and faces up to five years in jail.
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Russia Starts Probe Into Lawyer’s Death
Russian investigators on Monday launched a criminal investigation of two prison officials—one of them a doctor—in the case of the 2009 death of a hedge-fund lawyer who was jailed after alleging officers of Russia’s Interior Ministry took part in a $230 million tax fraud.
Human-rights activists hailed the probe as a possible sign of progress, noting that it was the first time government officials specifically blamed anyone since Sergei Magnitsky’s death in a Moscow jail.
More criminal cases are possible, said Vladimir Markin, a spokesman for Russia’s Investigative Committee, the government’s leading investigative organ.
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