Posts Tagged ‘gazeta’
Editorial: political disqualification
The West’s Olympic boycott of Lukashenko is sending a clear signal to ex-Soviet dictatorships. The West isn’t holding out hope for democratization and has started to see them as the political heirs of the Soviet regime.
The London Olympics organization committee denied accreditation to Belarus President Alexander Lukashenko who also heads the National Olympics committee. May be the International Olympic Committee can still persuade the British authorities and the organization committee to reconsider, but for now the President of Belarus has no access to to the Games for political reasons.
USA and EU didn’t recognize the election results in Belarus in December 2010 when Lukashenko was reelected for a fourth term. The confrontation between the West and Belarus worsened after the protest rallies by those unhappy with the election results were brutally scattered, and afterwards several presidential candidates were sentenced to real prison time in show trials. Now there are several economic sanctions in effect against Belarus, initiated because there are political prisoners in Belarus. Moreover, Lukashenko and several Belarussian officials have been blacklisted from entry in EU and USA. This prohibition may be the formal reason for the denial of Lukashenko’s accreditation.
The Belarussian president evidently foresaw these events. Recently, when meeting the Belarus Olympic sportemen, Lukashenko lamented about the politicization of modern olympics. “This is politics, sometimes dirty politics,” he said. Nevertheless, he ordered his sportsmen to bring as many medals home as possible. And even altered the main Olympic principle “participation is more important than winning”: “It’s winning that’s important for us, not participation,” Lukashenko said.
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Editorial: don’t trust, don’t fear, ask!
Members of the Presidential council on human rights probably supposed that after an invitation to collaborate with the authorities, they could soften their morals and make it respect the law a little bit more. But only the power can decide if it will punish or pardon, will it act by the law or rule arbitrary.
Russia needs to prolong its modernization course, just to prove it once followed it. “Our council is supported by those parts of society which think that our country needs to be modernized. The country must not fall into stagnation, it mustn’t remain so archaic in terms of social structure or state machine construction,” said Mikhail Fedotov, the chairman of the Presidential council on human rights.
Meanwhile, several of his colleagues in the council are not going to collaborate with the government in helping to modernize the country. The first to leave Fedotov was the director of Transparency International Russia, Elena Panfilova, who was preparing a report on the fight with the corruption as part of her work in the council. True, it would be naïve to consider that this fight, despite all the anti-corruption rhetoric of President Medvedev and even the adoption of a national anticorruption plan, now almost forgotten, has brought any result. There’s more corruption in Russia now, not less, on all the steps of the state stairway.
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Russia 2012 forum highlights the need to separate government and economy
Mass privatization, power body reforms, creation of a competitive political system and the pardon of Mikhail Khodorkovsky – these are the steps that foreign investors are waiting for from the Russian ruling elite, as the annual “Russia 2012” economic forum showed.
The forum was organized by Russia’s largest bank, Sberbank, and investment company Troika dialogue as a continuation of the Davos economic forum.
Troika Dialogue head, Ruben Vardanyan, described Russia’s three main challenges. “First of all, corruption. Secondly, the problem of government’s interference in the economy and the high level of monopolization. Thirdly, the political system has outdated itself,” Vardanyan said while opening of the forum on Thursday.
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Magnitsky family to ask human rights council for protection from police
Family and relatives of Sergey Magnitsky, the lawyer of the London-based investment fund Hermitage Capital who died in custody two years ago, are addressing the presidential human rights council after being pressured by the Interior Ministry, the fund’s press-release obtained by Gazeta.ru said.
“The Interior Ministry has for the fifth time sent a summons to Magnitsky’s relatives to participate in the investigation, refusing all their complaints about illegitimacy of the posthumous prosecution of Magnitsky,” the press-release said.
“I do not find it possible to take part in investigation procedures in the status which is not prescribed by the law and was given to me without my approval. I refuse to take part in the patently unlawful actions of this case, in the framework of which and on the basis of fabricated proof, my son was repressed,” Magnitsky’s mother, Natalya Magnitsky, said in a statement to the prosecutor general, Viktor Tchaika.
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