Stop the Untouchables. Justice for Sergei Magnitsky.

Guilty: Russian court passes verdict on dead lawyer at center of row with the West

Christian Science Monitor

A mild-mannered corporate lawyer who’s been dead for almost four years was found guilty of tax evasion in a Moscow court today.

The posthumous trial of Sergei Magnitsky, who testified about a $230 million tax scam by high officials and then found himself arrested by the same police officers he had accused, had become for many people around the world a symbol of just how strange – and often, scary – a place Russia has become during the third Kremlin term of Vladimir Putin.

The vast gulf of disagreement between Russia and the West over the Magnitsky case has been, perhaps, the single most painful aggravating factor in the worst diplomatic chill between Moscow and Washington since the end of the cold war.

Mr. Magnitsky died under suspicious circumstances, after allegedly being beaten in a Moscow pre-trial detention center in November 2009, about a year after his arrest.