Posts Tagged ‘la times’
Russian court convicts dead lawyer Magnitsky; case led to adoption ban
A judge on Thursday found Sergei Magnitsky, a Russian whistleblower who died in custody in 2009, guilty of tax evasion, bringing an end to an unusual, posthumous trial that drew international condemnation and eroded U.S.-Russian relations.
The ruling against Magnitsky, a lawyer who disclosed an alleged multimillion-dollar scam, was largely symbolic. Judge Igor Alisov of Moscow’s Tverskoy district declared the case closed and there was no judgment against Magnitsky’s estate.
However, Magnitsky’s former boss, William Browder, CEO and co-founder of the investment fund Hermitage Capital Management, was also found guilty of tax evasion and sentenced to nine years in a Russian prison camp. He had been tried in absentia as part of the same case and said he will stop traveling to Russia or allied countries where he might face arrest.
In a telephone interview from New York, Browder called the court ruling “one of the most shameful moments for Russia since the days of Josef Stalin.”
Some human rights activists, including those close to the Kremlin, called the ruling against Magnitsky and the trial itself absurd.
“It is not the most appropriate of judicial decisions taken in Russia in recent times, putting it mildly,” said Mikhail Fedotov, the chairman of the Presidential Council on Civic Society and Human Rights, a Kremlin advisory body. “Besides, the dead can’t be tried by any human court; it is up to history to try them.”
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U.S. Magnitsky list penalizes 18 Russians for alleged rights abuses
The Obama administration has sanctioned 18 Russian officials for alleged violations of human rights in their country, adding new strain to the difficult U.S.-Russian relationship.
U.S. officials released the names of 18 Russian officials on Friday who they said were involved in three human rights cases, including the persecution and death of Russian whistle-blower Sergei Magnitsky. The officials will be denied visas to the United states, and any U.S. financial assets they have will be frozen.
The blacklisting was carried out under the Sergei Magnitsky Rule of Law Accountability Act of 2012, which has become a major irritant between the United States and Russia. Russians consider the law an example of hypocritical American meddling and have already adopted a retaliatory law calling for sanctions against U.S. officials.
U.S. officials said other Russian officials were sanctioned on a separate, classified blacklist. Those officials can’t be publicly identified without threatening U.S. security, they said.
Officials in Russia said they would announce their own blacklisting of U.S. officials involved in what they see as human rights abuses, as well as lawmakers responsible for the Magnitsky act.
“We will react, and [our] U.S. partners are aware of that,” Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said at a news conference in Switzerland.
But the American list doesn’t include the names of top Russian officials, a fact that appeared to soften the reaction in Moscow.
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Russia finds no evidence of torture in Sergei Magnitsky case
Russian investigators found no evidence of violence against a lawyer who died in custody after accusing officials and police officers of running a multimillion-dollar tax refund scam, and have ended their probe, officials said Tuesday.
Sergei Magnitsky, who worked as a legal advisor for the Hermitage Capital Management investment fund in Moscow, died in 2009 of heart insufficiency and brain and lung edema resulting from diabetes and hepatitis while in pretrial detention on tax charges, the Russian Investigative Committee said on its website.
Human rights groups had described Magnitsky’s death as suspicious and alleged that he was tortured after his 2008 arrest, denied medical treatment and beaten in the final hours of his life. Magnitsky’s arrest had followed his allegations that officials engaged in tax fraud had embezzled $230 million from state coffers.
“During Magnitsky’s stay in investigation prisons no special conditions were created for keeping him in custody different from the keeping of other prisoners under investigation, no pressure, no physical violence or torture was applied on him,” the committee’s statement said. “Thus in the course of the criminal case investigation no objective data of crimes against Sergei Magnitsky was obtained.”
The case led to a U.S. measure, the Sergei Magnitsky Rule of Law Accountability Act, signed by President Obama in December, which imposed visa restrictions and froze the U.S. bank accounts of some Russian officials. Moscow responded by banning adoption of Russian orphans by American couples.
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A Russian ‘frenemy’
The White House is trying to revive the “reset” with Vladimir Putin’s Russia. It is likely to be a wasted effort. The reset is dead not because of someone’s ill will or mistakes. It is because Washington and Moscow have reached the limit of accommodation that neither could overstep without compromising the central elements and moral content of their foreign and domestic policies. The Obama administration’s effort would be far better spent on devising a more realistic strategy that at least stabilizes the relationship, albeit on a lower level of interaction.
Two sets of factors are mostly responsible for the growing disjunction between the United States and Russia: the diminution of Russia’s geo-strategic relevance for some key U.S. objectives, and the increasing prominence and role that Kremlin domestic behavior plays in U.S.-Russian relations.
In Afghanistan, the rapid drawdown of U.S. troops obviates much of the need for personnel and materiel transportation through Russia after 2014. With regard to Iran, another key U.S. concern, Russia has unambiguously signaled the end of its support for even watered-down resolutions that it previously voted for at the U.N. Security Council.
Syria has been an even starker demonstration of the diversion in guiding values and objectives. Russia thrice vetoed U.S.-supported Security Council resolutions calling for sanctions against the murderous Assad regime. The last of the vetoes was cast in July, despite President Obama’s appeal to President Putin in an hourlong telephone conversation. Throughout the conflict, Russia has continued to sell weapons and technology to Assad.
On Russia’s domestic front, following Putin’s reelection in March 2012, the Kremlin has undertaken a concerted and consistent effort to repress, intimidate, marginalize and stigmatize not just the political opposition but also citizens participating in peaceful protests and members of nonpolitical, independent civil movements and groups. Since the run-up to the Duma election in the second half of 2011, from Putin on down, the regime has been using alleged subversion by external enemies to justify the crackdown.
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Russia says USAID ousted for meddling in elections
Russia’s Foreign Ministry on Wednesday said that the U.S. Agency for International Development was being barred from operating in the country beginning Oct. 1 because it had meddled in elections.
The statement followed a State Department announcement the day before that USAID had been ordered out after operating in Russia for two decades.
The U.S. agency had strayed from “the declared goals of assisting the development of bilateral humanitarian cooperation,” Alexander Lukashevich, a spokesman for the Foreign Ministry, said in a statement posted on the ministry’s website. “We are talking about attempts via distributing grants to influence political processes, including elections of various levels and civil society institutions.”
The government of President Vladimir Putin had previously accused Western governments of trying to influence the parliamentary elections in December and subsequent protests calling into question the results of that balloting and Putin’s own election in March.
One of the first victims of this week’s order will be Golos, an independent Russian organization whose monitors reported massive violations during the elections. The group was one of the key recipients of USAID grants.
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