Posts Tagged ‘cathy fitzpatrick’
Why Magnitsky is Good for Business
Momentum is building in the US press for passage of the Magnitsky Act. After the liberal initially won the mindshare advocating only repeal of JVA with no further action (i.e. with this ambiguous and wimpy New York Times piece), yesterday, the Wall Street Journal rightly called Magnitsky “a bi-partisan challenge to Obama’s blind spot on Russia”:
For two years, the White House has scuttled the Magnitsky bill. Senate Foreign Relations Chairman John Kerry, who dreams of the top job at Foggy Bottom in a second Obama term, refuses to hold hearings. Mike McFaul, the new ambassador to Russia, last week called it “redundant” because the State Department put some Russian officials on a visa black list last year. He didn’t mention that it only did so in response to Senate pressure and in an effort to pre-empt Senate action. Nor did he say that, unlike the Magnitsky bill, State didn’t publicly name names or ban them from using the U.S. banking system.
Russian opposition leader Ilya Yashin blogs today in a post made “best post of the day” in favour of retiring the Jackson-Vanik Amendment but passing the Magnitsky Act. He describes a recent meeting with Ambassador McFaul about JVA — and it’s good that Russian opposition figures are making clear their support for the Magnitsky bill since McFaul tried to portray the opposition as only interested in JVA.
He then talks about how Russia should not be punished and kept out of the modern world economy and JVA is essentially an anachronism. Ok.
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Don’t Hand Russia the Moral Victory of Abolition of Jackson-Vanik: Graduate, and Pass Magnitsky Bill
The year was 1975, writes Alex Goldfarb (in a book excerpted in snob.ru to come out soon which I’m translating).
Six Russian Jewish men sat at a kitchen table in Moscow in January. The scene was reminiscent of a famous panting by Russian artist Ilya Repin, said Masha Slepak, an activist and wife of prominent Soviet refusenik leader Vladimir Slepak. Except it was the opposite of Repin’s scene — no one was laughing or triumphant. The writers — all scientists who had been denied permission to leave the Soviet Union — were dejected, and feeling betrayed. They were writing to President Gerald Ford, and they were protesting his waiver in 1975 of the 1974 Jackon-Vanik Amendment, which had been passed due to the efforts of Sen. Henry Jackson, over the objections of Secretary of State Henry Kissinger.
The Jewish refusenik movement leader and human rights leaders such as Andrei Sakharov had applauded the Jackson-Vanik Amendment when it was passed in 1974; now it was in jeopardy. Alex Goldfarb, who served for a time as the Soviet dissident movement’s press officer, writes in his memoirs of how depressed the Jewish activists felt after Ford’s decision. A successful lever had been established after great debate; it was going to work — and now the political capital was in danger of being squandered.
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