Stop the Untouchables. Justice for Sergei Magnitsky.

Justice for Sergei Magnitsky!

Jerusalem Post

Magnitsky was a tax lawyer who uncovered the largest tax fraud in Russian history and paid for it with his life.

This week, Russian President Vladimir Putin made an important state visit to Israel, where, understandably, the issues of Iran and Syria were at the fore. The case and cause of Sergei Magnitsky were not on the agenda.

Admittedly, Sergei Magnitsky is not a household name in Israel, let alone on the Israeli foreign policy radar screen. But his story raises significant questions about the culture of corruption and impunity in Russia, its flawed judiciary and the ruling regime’s abuse of the rule of law.

Magnitsky was a tax lawyer who uncovered the largest tax fraud in Russian history and paid for it with his life. He blew the whistle on widespread government corruption, involving senior officials from six Russian ministries.

The very officials against whom he testified then arrested and detained him, beginning a nightmare in which he was thrown into a prison cell without bail or trial, and systematically tortured for one year in an attempt to force him to retract his testimony.

Despite the physical and psychological pain Magnitsky endured from his captors, he refused to perjure himself, even as his health deteriorated.

Denied medical care for the last six months of his detention, he died in excruciating pain at the age of 37, having developed a severe pancreatic condition while being held in the Butyrka prison – a notorious Czaristera jail in Moscow that that also held Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and Raoul Wallenberg.