Posts Tagged ‘denis macshane’
UK MP wants to bar Russian officials from London Olympics
UK Member of Parliament Denis MacShane called for barring a number of Russian officials from attending the 2012 Summer Olympics in London.
MacShane addressed parliament on Wednesday with a report on human rights in Russia, including the case of lawyer Sergei Magnitsky, who died in pre-trial detention two years ago.
MacShane challenged Prime Minister David Cameron to follow the example of Margaret Thatcher, who in 1980 headed the campaign to boycott the Moscow Olympics in protest over the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan.
“In 1980, Mrs. Thatcher had the guts to say no to a formal British endorsement of the Moscow Olympics,” MacShane said.
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Exposed: the ugly face of Putin’s Russia
In a powerful documentary on Putin’s Russia made by Norma Percy to be shown on BBC2 on 19 January there is an extraordinary moment when the oligarch Mikhail Khodorkovsky confronts the recently elected President Putin. On film he tells him that Russia is so corrupt up that to 10 per cent of national wealth is disappearing into the hands of the post-Soviet bureaucracy. So much so that all the best and brightest graduates leaving college want to be tax police. That’s where the money is to be made, complains the owner of Yukos, as tax shakedowns were the most common form of getting rich quick.
At the time, in 2002, the sleek, jowly Khodorkovsky was still Russia’s top oligarch. As he confronts Putin the Russian leader’s eyes narrow and he taps his pencil with irritation on the table as he rebukes the oligarch at a business leaders’ council held in the Kremlin which was filmed and remains an electrifying moment in the documentary. Stalin also used a pencil rather than a pen to initial or tick lists to be sent to the Gulag. Khodorkovsky today finds himself in prison where those business leaders who did not pay their dues to the Putinocracy have found themselves if they did not flee to exile in time.
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UK ‘should tell Vladimir Putin he is not welcome at Olympics’
MPs call for Russian prime minister to be told he is not wanted at London games unless Russia improves human rights record.
Britain should tell Vladimir Putin that he is not welcome at the London Olympics unless Russia makes meaningful efforts to improve its human rights record, MPs will say.
In a move likely to infuriate the Kremlin, Labour’s former Europe minister Denis MacShane will make a parliamentary call for the government to make it clear that Putin is not wanted at the games.
Dozens of heads of state are expected to attend the opening ceremony on 27 July. The Queen will preside over the ceremony, with each national team – including Russia – taking part in a parade.
Putin, currently the prime minister, is certain to win Russia’s presidential election in March despite public discontent and huge protests against election fraud last month. He will be back in the Kremlin and on the international stage from May.
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David Cameron’s trip to the Kremlin must address the Sergei Magnitsky case
The Russian lawyer, employed by a British citizen, died in jail. The prime minister must join Washington in annnouncing a travel ban on those involved.
In diplomacy there is an unofficial statute of limitations on rows that poison state-to-state relations. November will see the fifth anniversary of the murder of Alexander Litvinenko by Russian agents in London. David Cameron will certainly raise the case when he goes to Moscow for his first trip to the Kremlin but equally certainly will have to swallow the Russian dismissal of the crime. But he will find it less easy to swerve around the case of Sergei Magnitsky, the lawyer employed by a British citizen and his London-based investment company. Magnitsky exposed the biggest tax swindle in Russian history, and was put to death by Russian officials for his pains.
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Mr Cameron goes to Moscow – finally and forlornly
The UK prime minister’s visit to Moscow also reveals much about the EU’s relationship with Russia.
David Cameron makes his first visit to Russia to meet his opposite number, Vladimir Putin, on 12 September.
While Germany’s Chancellor Angela Merkel and France’s President Nicolas Sarkozy rushed to Moscow when they arrived in power, the British prime minister has waited 16 months, preferring to travel to China, India, Turkey, the US and any number of EU capitals before going to Moscow. In fact, the closest Cameron has got to Russia was in 2008, when, as leader of the opposition, he went to Tbilisi just after the Russian invasion of Georgia to show solidarity with the Georgian people.
He arrives in Moscow with a long list of difficulties in UK-Russia relations. This may seem odd as Russia and the UK have no obvious geopolitical rivalries. London is home to Russian oligarchs who own Chelsea football club as well as two of the UK’s most important newspapers, the Independent and the Evening Standard. British private schools are full of the children of rich Russians who help keep the high-end London housing market flourishing.
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Great Britain might introduce sanctions against the Russians on the Magnitsky List
WPS: What the Papers Say
MacShane said, “Magnitsky’s death was gruesome but nobody has ever been brought to answer for it even though identities of these people are known. Hermitage Capital is a British company. Its head William Browder is a citizen of Great Britain. The authorities of Great Britain cannot remain a disinterested observer.”
“Since Moscow is clearly unwilling to prosecute the people whose decisions and actions resulted in the death of an innocent, it becomes our duty. Putin and Medvedev ought to be reminded that the days of Josef Stalin are over and impunity with them. The United States has made its contribution. It’s our turn now.”
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British MP Urges Russia Visa Restrictions Over Magnitsky Case
British Member of Parliament (MP) Denis MacShane has called on the British government to place visa restrictions on Russian officials accused of involvement in the death of Sergei Magnitsky, a Russian lawyer who died in prison in 2009.
“What the United States government has done is to list 60 Russian officials who are named in connection with Mr. Magnitsky’s death and I’m urging the British prime minister, as our other British MPs, to do the same thing,” MacShane told RFE/RL’s Russian Service.
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