Stop the Untouchables. Justice for Sergei Magnitsky.

The Home Stretch: the Magnitsky Act in Congress

Institute of Modern Russia

On July 26, 2012 the U.S. House Ways and Means Committee approved the repeal of the Jackson-Vanik Amendment, which had been passed in 1974. Last month, key Congressional committees had unanimously passed the Magnistky Act, a law imposing severe sanctions on those who have violated human rights in Russia and elsewhere. Vladimir V. Kara-Murza, a leading Russian journalist, activist, and, until recently, the RTVi Washington Bureau Chief, reports on the repeal of the historic amendment and the passage of the Magnitsky Act. As he explained to IMR, Kara-Murza was forced out of his position at RTVi precisely because of his participation in the preparation and advocacy for the expansion of the Magnitsky Act.

It took the U.S. House Ways and Means Committee only forty minutes on Thursday, July 26th, to mark up the repeal of the well-known Jackson-Vanik Amendment. For forty years, the latter has been an irritant in the relations between the White House and the Kremlin, and had come to symbolize a rare victory of a principled approach over realpolitik. The amendment to the 1974 Trade Act, proposed by Democrats Senator Henry Jackson and Congressman Charles Vanik, restricted U.S. trade with Moscow in protest of the restriction to the freedom to emigrate from the USSR. The Nixon-Ford-Kissinger administration opposed the amendment unanimously with Brezhnev’s Politburo. It took Andrei Sakharov’s open letter, in which he urged Congress to “rise above the transitory group interests of profit and prestige” to convince hesitant lawmakers. “Abandoning a principled policy would constitute a betrayal of the thousands of Jews and non-Jews who want to emigrate, of the hundreds in camps and mental hospitals, of the victims of the Berlin Wall,” wrote Sakharov. “It would amount to a total surrender of democratic principles in the face of blackmail and violence.”

For two decades now there has been talk of repealing the amendment, which had long since fulfilled its historical mission. Presidents Boris Yeltsin and Bill Clinton announced an agreement to that end at their very first meeting in April 1993. A repeal in the early 1990s would have been most logical, especially since, in addition to the freedom of emigration, post-Communist Russia has attained many other democratic freedoms, including freedom of the press and free elections. At first, it was the U.S. Congress that could never quite get around to repealing the amendment; later, events in Russia (the Chechen wars, Vladimir Putin’s rise to power, the take over of NTV, the Yukos case) were not conducive to inspiring a grand gesture from Washington. In any case, the status quo had no effect on trade, since the application of the Jackson-Vanik Amendment toward Moscow has been waived since 1989.

In the best traditions of realpolitik, a repeal of the amendment was necessitated by U.S. economic interests. After Russia was officially invited into the World Trade Organization at the December 2011 Geneva ministerial conference, American businesses (large and small) and the agricultural lobby dramatically increased pressure on Congress to repeal the act. The retention of formal restrictions on trade with Russia would have prevented U.S. exporters from reaping the benefits of Russia’s WTO membership (including lower tariffs and conflict-resolution mechanisms), thus giving a competitive advantage to Moscow’s trading partners from the European Union and China. Economists predict that as a result of Russia’s WTO accession and the establishment of permanent normal trade relations (PNTR) with the U.S., American exports to Russia will double (from the current $9 billion a year) in the next five years. In Congress, Democrats and Republicans alike declared their support for repealing the amendment. The Obama Administration marked this issue as one of its priorities.