Posts Tagged ‘jackson-vanik’
Putin’s Choice
Vladimir Putin’s return to the Kremlin as Russia’s president was always a foregone conclusion. But, when he is sworn in on May 7, he will retake formal charge of a country whose politics – even Putin’s own political future – has turned unpredictable.
Putin’s return to the presidency, following a period of de facto control as prime minister, was supposed to signify a reassuring continuation of “business as usual” – a strong, orderly state devoid of the potentially destabilizing effects of multiparty democracy and bickering politicians.
Instead, the Russian people have now challenged the status quo. Their reaction to Putin’s plan – from the announcement last September that President Dmitri Medvedev would stand aside for his mentor, to the deeply flawed parliamentary and presidential elections – and their accumulated resentment of Kremlin cronies’ massive enrichment, has placed pressure on Putin and the top-down system of government that he created.
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Why the Magnitsky Act Makes Sense
Senator John Kerry recently postponed—once again—the Senate Foreign Relations Committee’s consideration of the Sergey Magnitsky Act. This is wrong. Individual- and property-rights violations in Russia are undermining government legitimacy, destabilizing the country and preventing investment and business development—and the proposed Magnitsky Act can provide the tools to combat this sad state of affairs.
A weak rule of law and pervasive corruption—including the failing court and law-enforcement systems—are at the heart of these persistent rights violations, which reflect both the Soviet legacy and the older Russian tradition of the patrimonial state. Bad cops and courts are challenging everyday Russians, as well as Western and domestic investors. Top Russian leaders, including presidents Vladimir Putin and Dmitri Medvedev, have complained bitterly about the state of affairs but done little to improve things.
Now, Congress has a chance to press for trade reforms that are in the best interests of the United States while supporting the cause of human rights for all. The bipartisan bill was drafted in response to the death of Sergei Magnitsky. He died in detention following his whistle-blowing on massive fraud allegedly committed by Russian officials. It provides a practical and balanced way forward—something that can serve as a prerequisite for the lifting of the obsolete Jackson-Vanik Amendment, a 1974 restriction on trade with authoritarian regimes. The new Magnitsky Act would accommodate Russian membership in the World Trade Organization (WTO) while signaling long-term American commitment to the rule of law beyond Jackson-Vanik.
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How to Get Autocrats to Bend
28 April 2012
Editorial
U.S. Representative Jim McGovern introduced an expanded Magnitsky act to Congress last week. The focus of the bill goes beyond the original legislation sponsored by Senator Ben Cardin, which targeted 60 Russian officials implicated in the 2009 death of Sergei Magnitsky in pretrial detention. McGovern’s bill contains an additional open clause that expands the same type of sanctions — visa bans and asset freezes — against Russian officials implicated in other cases involving “gross violations of human rights.”
Around the same time that U.S. lawmakers were working to tighten the screws on Russia, the European Union was seeing the results of similar economic sanctions on Belarus. Andrei Sannikov, an opposition presidential candidate in Belarus’ December 2010 election, and his campaign manager, Dmitry Bondarenko, were pardoned by President Alexander Lukashenko and released on April 15 after serving 16 months in prison. The two, along with hundreds of others, were arrested for taking part in mass protests against Lukashenko’s landslide reelection, which independent monitors say was heavily rigged.
Belarussian political analysts and Sannikov himself believe that the dominant factor behind the pardons were EU economic and political sanctions levied against the Lukashenko regime in March.
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State Department Sends Mixed Message on Rights Bill
The Moscow Times
25 April 2012
The U.S. State Department says it is in favor of punishing Russian officials implicated in human rights abuses, but does not necessarily support a congressional bill designed for that aim.
Asked if the department encouraged or discouraged the so-called “Magnitsky bill,” spokeswoman Victoria Nuland said late Tuesday that “we do support the goals of the legislation,” according to the state department’s website.
Nuland also said it was wrong to link the bill to a repeal of the Jackson-Vanik legislation, something that is pitting President Barack Obama against a number U.S. lawmakers.
The bill is motivated by the death of Sergei Magnitsky, whose supporters say he was tortured to death in jail.
It was resubmitted to the House of Representatives last week, prompting Moscow’s Ambassador to the United States Sergei Kislyak to warn that it would significantly hurt ties with Washington.
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Russian envoy warns on U.S. human rights bill
Reuters
By Doug Palmer and Susan Cornwell
WASHINGTON | Mon Apr 23, 2012 11:45pm BST
Russia’s ambassador to the United States warned that proposed U.S. legislation to punish Russian officials involved in human rights abuses could a have significant negative impact on U.S.-Russian relations.
Russian Ambassador Sergei Kislyak said the U.S. Congress should not tie the so-called Sergei Magnitsky bill to an expected vote this year on establishing “permanent normal trade relations” between the two countries.
“If that is taken to an extreme, it’ll be a significant negative impact on Russian-Americans relations,” Kislyak told reporters. “We are a serious country and we do not want to be told what to do within the limits of Russian law.”
The 2009 death of the 37-year-old Magnitsky, who worked for equity fund Hermitage Capital and died after a year in Russian jails, spooked investors and tarnished Russia’s image.
Before his arrest, Magnitsky had testified against Russian interior ministry officials during a tax evasion case against Hermitage. The Kremlin human rights council says he was probably beaten to death.
The case has heightened concerns in Congress about human rights conditions in Russia and made it even harder for the White House to persuade lawmakers to lift a Cold War-era trade provision known as the Jackson-Vanik amendment.
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Turning the Tables on Russia
The New York Times. The Opinion Pages
By JOE NOCERA
Published: April 16, 2012
Who knew that what corrupt Russian officials care about, more than just about anything, is getting their assets — and themselves — out of their own country? They own homes in St. Tropez, fly to Miami for vacation and set up bank accounts in Switzerland. They understand the importance of stashing their money someplace where the rule of law matters, which is most certainly not Russia. Besides, getting out of Russia is one of the pleasures of being a corrupt Russian official.
As it turns out, a man named William Browder knows this. As does Senator Benjamin Cardin, a Democrat from Maryland. As do plenty of other senators, on both sides of the aisle.
As a result, the Senate Foreign Relations Committee will likely report out a bill in the next few weeks that would force the State Department to deny visas, and freeze the assets, of Russian officials who are labeled “gross human rights abusers.” After that, it will be attached to an important trade bill that the Democratic-led Senate and the Republican-controlled House need to pass later this summer. Which would make it a rare and welcome moment of bipartisanship in this rancorous political season.
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Resetting the Reset
What’s behind Obama’s push against the Sergei Magnitsky Rule of Law Accountability Act?
MICHAEL WEISS
April 13, 2012
For all his pretensions of being a “transformative” president, Barack Obama’s foreign policy prescriptions are rooted in a deeply conservative and nostalgic tradition. When it comes to Russia, the tradition this White House channels most is that of Richard Nixon. This seemingly incongruous resemblance was well illustrated in a recent controversy over the nullification of a Nixon-era piece of legislation, the Jackson-Vanik amendment, which binds U.S. trade relations with autocratic regimes to those regimes’ human rights records. Jackson-Vanik is the thorn in the side of Obama’s “reset” policy with Russia, which wants to accede to the World Trade Organization—a major component of the reset. So long as Jackson-Vanik still applies to Russia, American businesses won’t be able to fully profit from that accession. President Obama’s push to repeal Jackson-Vanik has been described as cynical and manipulative by both the veteran Russian dissidents who benefitted from its passage in the 1970s and the younger generation of oppositionists who seek new instruments of American leverage against Vladimir Putin.
The Jackson-Vanik amendment was originally bundled into Title IV of the 1974 Trade Act and restricts bilateral trade with non-market economies on the basis of their allowance of foreign emigration. Written in categorical language and conceived by the late Senator Henry “Scoop” Jackson (D-WA) as a counterweight to Henry Kissinger’s policy of detente with Leonid Brezhnev, the amendment was clearly designed to punish the Soviet Union for refusing to grant emigration visas to its embattled minorities, particularly Jews. The Final Act of the Helsinki Accords was signed the following year, committing the Warsaw Pact nations to conforming to international human rights norms. Brezhnev thought that basket wouldn’t matter so much as the one over which the toughest negotiations about the Final Act depended: “Questions Relating to Security in Europe”, a suite of ten principles that respected the territorial integrity of member states as well as a policy of nonintervention in their internal affairs. Brezhnev was confident that the human rights component would be quietly ignored: Kissinger told him so.
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Russia Slams Attempts to Link Jackson-Vanik with Magnitsky Case
Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov strongly rejected on Thursday attempts by some U.S. lawmakers to link the repeal of the Soviet-era Jackson-Vanik amendment hampering Russian-U.S. trade with the adoption of new “anti-Russian laws” related to the death of Russian lawyer Sergei Magnitsky.
“Attempts to replace an anti-Soviet amendment with anti-Russian laws are categorically unacceptable for us,” Lavrov said.
The Magnitsky case is Russia’s domestic affair which is being dealt with at the highest level, he said, and “before the court makes a decision in this case, we should not interfere.” The U.S. authorities know Russia’s position on the issue “very well,” he added.
A group of influential U.S. senators, including former Republican presidential candidate John McCain, proposed in mid-March introducing a blacklist of Russian officials allegedly linked to Hermitage Capital lawyer Magnitsky’s death in a Moscow pre-trial detention center in November 2009 in exchange for the cancellation of the Jackson-Vanik amendment.
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Russia’s treatment of US ambassador a reflection of shaky relations
In the past eight days, the US ambassador to Russia has been harassed by state media, called arrogant by his host country’s foreign minister and had guests accosted outside his home by the Kremlin youth group Nashi.
American officials had been assured that the anti-US rhetoric streaming out of Moscow since the end of last year was part of Vladimir Putin’s campaign to return to the presidency, a populist move to blame Russia’s ills on a tested enemy of yore. But the continued attacks on Michael McFaul, who took up his post as ambassador in January, have raised questions about the fate of US-Russia relations under Putin’s presidency.
The latest incident came on Wednesday, when Sergei Lavrov, Russia’s foreign minister, chided McFaul for reacting “arrogantly” to Russian concerns over US plans to build a missile defence shield in Europe.
“Yesterday our colleague, the US ambassador, arrogantly announced there will be no changes on missile defence, even though it would seem that an ambassador should understand it is necessary to take the interests of the state in question into account,” Lavrov said.
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To learn more about what happened to Sergei Magnitsky please read below
- Sergei Magnitsky
- Why was Sergei Magnitsky arrested?
- Sergei Magnitsky’s torture and death in prison
- President’s investigation sabotaged and going nowhere
- The corrupt officers attempt to arrest 8 lawyers
- Past crimes committed by the same corrupt officers
- Petitions requesting a real investigation into Magnitsky's death
- Worldwide reaction, calls to punish those responsible for corruption and murder
- Complaints against Lt.Col. Kuznetsov
- Complaints against Major Karpov
- Cover up
- Press about Magnitsky
- Bloggers about Magnitsky
- Corrupt officers:
- Sign petition
- Citizen investigator
- Join Justice for Magnitsky group on Facebook
- Contact us
- Sergei Magnitsky
