Posts Tagged ‘list’
Browder Expects Broader Magnitsky List Sanctions for Russian Officials in U.S., Europe
The United States may publish the extended version of the “Magnitsky list” as early as next month, while Europe is expected to pass a similar measure, Hermitage Capital investment fund president and bill supporter William Browder said.
The Magnitsky Act, enacted by the U.S. Congress in December 2012 and named after late Hermitage Capital lawyer Sergei Magnitsky, imposed personal sanctions on Russian officials responsible for human rights violations and obstructing the rule of law.
“The law is only one year old now,” an assistant to U.S. Senator Ben Cardin, who helped draft the bill, said in an interview for the Voice of America. “We are at the very beginning of its implementation process and anticipate its expansion both here in the U.S. and Europe.”
Executive Director of U.S.-based human rights NGO Freedom House David Kramer said his organization is currently working with lawmakers in several countries to “try to advance the adoption of a similar law as early as next year.”
Meanwhile, Russian lawmakers say they are unaware of U.S. plans to expand the “Magnitsky list” or European intentions to pass similar legislation, Interfax reported.
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Banned by Moscow, and Proud of It
Some kids dream of winning the World Series, others of going to outer space. I dreamed of being declared persona non grata by Moscow.
Stalin once bestowed that honor on George Kennan, architect of the Cold War doctrine of containment. Last week, Russian President Vladimir Putin made this conservative’s dream come true.
On April 13, Russia banned 18 Americans from entering the country. The lucky few include a federal judge, prosecutors and law-enforcement agents, former Vice President Dick Cheney’s chief of staff, commanders of the U.S. Navy base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. And me—apparently for my Justice Department work in approving interrogation and detention policies after the 9/11 attacks.
According to Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov, the blacklist punishes “people actually responsible for the legalization of torture and indefinite detention of prisoners in Guantanamo, for arrests and unjust sentences for our countrymen.” Happily, I learned the news while at Camp Pendleton for a federal judicial conference. Sitting among thousands of U.S. Marines seemed a good place to contemplate Putin justice.
Russia does not typically scour the world to protest the latest human-rights violations. Moscow announced its travel ban in response to American sanctions on 18 Russian officials involved in the 2009 death of Sergei Magnitsky, a lawyer in Moscow.
Magnitsky had discovered that Interior Ministry officials had used his client, Hermitage Capital, as a front to procure a fraudulent $230 million tax refund. Instead of prosecuting the corrupt officers, Russian police arrested the whistleblower. According to an investigation by the Public Moscow Oversight Commission, jailers tortured and beat Magnitsky and withheld critical medical treatment until he died.
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‘Magnitsky List’: Powerful, if not perfect
The State Department’s “Magnitsky list” – sanctioned last Friday by the Obama administration, officially branding 18 Russian government officials as gross humans rights violators – was rightly criticized as inadequate and weak by the congressional authors of the original law authorizing the creation of the list.
Congressional champions of the Magnitsky Act pointed out that State seems to be purposely misreading the law, minimizing the act’s original power to punish those who have committed egregious human rights violations by applying the criteria only to those criminals who might be dumb enough to maintain financial assets in the United States.
The Magnitsky law was born out of Senator Ben Cardin’s (D-Md.) frustration with Secretary Hillary Clinton’s dismissal of his recommendation that State blacklist 60 Russian government officials connected to the death of Russian whistle-blower Sergei Magnitsky. Clinton’s State Department was truculently opposed not just to the Magnitsky act, but to naming and shaming even the most obvious of those who now reside on the Magnitsky list.
Although the critics are right to condemn the list as inadequate, the unveiling of the list underscores a more important point. Under John Kerry’s leadership, the State Department is sending a strong message that the era of appeasing kleptocratic dictators is over.
This particular law is limited to Russia, but efforts are afoot to expand its reach. Now every letter Congress writes to State – previously batted back with polite but meaningless form letters – has the potential to grow into a new round of Magnitsky-style laws sanctioning corrupt officials in governments around the world. It will have the most impact when human rights activists leverage the “Magnitsky magnifying effect” to name, shame and seize the assets of autocrats previously unknown to the public. Public opinion is a powerful tool: it can and should be leveraged to fight corruption.
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Cardin to meet with family of Russian lawyer
Sen. Ben Cardin is scheduled to meet Thursday with the family of a Russian lawyer whose death sparked an international outcry over human rights in that country, renewing focus on a controversy that has complicated U.S.-Russian relations at a sensitive time.
The meeting with the widow, mother and son of Sergei Magnitsky — who died in a Russian jail in 2009 after exposing corruption in the Russian government — comes just days after the State Department released a list of Russian officials barred from obtaining U.S. visas over alleged human rights abuses.
The list was required by a law championed by Cardin, a Maryland Democrat. He named the legislation for Magnitsky.
The Obama administration is trying to move beyond the controversy that erupted when Congress passed the law last year. While relations with Moscow remain strained — aggravated by differences over the civil war in Syria — the White House is seeking cooperation on Iran and the escalating tensions on the Korean peninsula.
Cardin, a member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, said he is not concerned that his meeting with the Magnitsky family or the naming of Russian officials prohibited from traveling in the United States might disrupt those broader international efforts.
“We can deal with more than one subject at a time,” he said in an interview.
The meeting, he said, “gives us a chance to underscore the importance of these new standards, of not abating on gross violators of internationally recognized human rights standards.”
Russian officials seem to be making a distinction between the White House and the Congress. The officials responded positively to a meeting with U.S. National Security Adviser Tom Donilon this week and a letter from President Barack Obama to Russian President Vladimir V. Putin. The two leaders are expected to meet later this year.
But those officials criticized what they described as a “Russiaphobic” Congress, a reference to the Magnitsky language. Lawmakers voted overwhelmingly in December to pass the measure after it was attached to a broader trade bill that was a priority for both countries.
The Putin administration has said the Magnitsky provision represents meddling in Russian affairs.
The measure required the State Department to publicly release a list of Russian human rights abusers, deny them visas and prohibit them from accessing U.S. banks.
The department released a list of 18 officials, most of whom were involved in the Magnitsky case, on Saturday. The Kremlin responded with a list that included several top U.S. officials involved with running the detention camp at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.
Last year, Russia passed a law banning U.S. adoptions of Russian children. It is named after a young Russian orphan who died in Virginia in 2008 after being left in a car by his adoptive father but is viewed as a retaliation for the Magnitsky Act.
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The president again turns a blind eye to Russia’s misdeeds
According to the State Department, the government of the Russian republic of Chechnya under Ramzan Kadyrov “has committed and continues to commit such serious human rights violations and abuses as extrajudicial killing, torture, disappearances and rape.” Mr. Kadyrov, State added in an August 2011 letter, “has been implicated personally” in “the killing of U.S. citizen Anna Politkovskaya, a journalist who had reported widely on human rights abuses in Chechnya.”
Yet when the Obama administration released on Friday a list of Russian officials who are to be subject to a visa ban and an asset freeze because of their complicity in human rights crimes, Mr. Kadyrov was not on it. The list of names — mandated by Congress in legislation that the administration strongly resisted — is a step toward holding the regime of Vladimir Putin accountable for its abuses, but it also is another example of President Obama’s questionable catering to the Kremlin.
Sixteen of the 18 names on the sanctions list are connected to Sergei Magnitsky, a whistleblowing Russian lawyer who died after being imprisoned and abused; it was his case that prompted Congress to pass the law last year. Under its provisions, the administration is required to identify Russian officials complicit in the persecution of Mr. Magnitsky, as well as in other human rights crimes, and publicly sanction them.
Some advocates of the law wondered why the list was so short; some 60 Russian officials have been connected to Mr. Magnitsky’s case alone, not to mention other notorious cases such as that of Ms. Politkovskaya, who was gunned down on Mr. Putin’s birthday in 2006. There are some good reasons: An asset freeze by the Treasury Department, which can be subject to legal challenge, has to meet a relatively high standard of evidence.
Administration officials concede, however, that some names were left off the list for political reasons. One is Mr. Kadyrov, who reportedly is included in a classified annex of officials who are to be denied visas but not be subject to an asset freeze. We were told that the administration did not want to target senior officeholders, out of concern that Russian reciprocation would ban members of Congress, Cabinet members or state governors (the equivalent of Mr. Kadyrov) from visiting Russia, further complicating U.S.-Russian relations at a time when Mr. Obama is still seeking to strike deals with Mr. Putin. As it is, the Kremlin issued a sanctions list over the weekend that included several officials of the George W. Bush administration.
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Can the Magnitsky list live up to its potential?
On Friday, the Treasury Department disclosed the names of 18 Russian officials who will be subjected to asset freezes and visa bans under the Magnitsky Act. Sixteen of these officials were complicit in the prosecution and death of whistle-blowing lawyer Sergei Magnitsky. The remaining two are Chechens; one connected to the death of a critic of Chechnya’s leader Ramzan Kadyrov and the other widely suspected of murdering US journalist Paul Klebnikov. Russia’s retaliation? A list of 18 Americans now banned from Russia that includes AEI’s John Yoo. To this he joked, “Darn, there goes my judo match with Putin.”
In comparison to the 280 Russian human rights violators that Congressman Jim McGovern submitted to the Obama administration earlier this month, the approved list of merely a dozen and a half low- and mid-level Russian bureaucrats disappointed human rights defenders. Yet with any luck, the appearance of two Chechens for reasons unrelated to Magnitsky’s death indicates that the administration is prepared to include additional Russian officials involved in other instances of human rights abuse. This is consistent with both the letter and spirit of the Sergei Magnitsky Act.
That said, although the administration did comply with a congressionally-mandated deadline to release the Magnitsky list by April 13, recent events have served to highlight President Obama’s refusal to publicly condemn the Putin regime for its human rights violations and rapid democratic regression over the last year. Obama didn’t say a word when the Russian authorities canceled their investigation of Magnitsky’s death. And he has remained silent during the ongoing posthumous trial to convict Magnitsky on bogus, politically motivated tax evasion charges. In response to the hundreds of recent NGO raids by the Russian police, German Chancellor Angela Merkel has publicly criticized the Kremlin’s attack on civil society. From Obama, not a peep.
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Russia blacklists 18 Americans in Magnitsky row
A row that began with the death of a lawyer in a Moscow prison is seriously affecting relations between Russia and the US.
A group Russians allegedly involved in a massive fraud and the killling of Sergei Magnitsky have been barred from the US.
Now the Kremlin has responded with its own blacklist.
Al Jazeera’s David Chater reports from Moscow.
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Putin’s Got a List
They say history repeats itself as farce, but it usually takes longer than this. A day after the U.S. government published its list of Russians banned from travel to the U.S. under the Magnitsky Act, Russia responded Saturday with two lists of its own.
The first is what the Russian Foreign Ministry dubbed the “Guantanamo List.” It bans former Bush Administration Justice Department official John Yoo, former Vice Presidential legal counselor David Addington, retired Major General Geoffrey Miller and Rear Admiral Jeffrey Harbeson from visiting Russia. Moscow accuses them of being “involved in the use and legalization of torture and indefinite detention” of prisoners at Guantanamo Bay.
Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney must be wondering what they did to merit exclusion from this honored club. We also like Mr. Yoo’s response, which was to say there goes his judo match with Putin.
Russia’s second list is aimed at those deemed to have infringed the “human rights and freedoms of Russian citizens abroad.” But the Foreign Ministry appears to be concerned with the freedom of only one Russian abroad, convicted arms dealer Viktor Bout.
Bout was sentenced to 25 years in prison last year for conspiring to sell arms to the Colombian narco-Marxists of FARC in order to help them kill Americans. The 14 Americans on Moscow’s second list—including U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara, former U.S. Attorney Michael Garcia and federal District Court Judge Jed Rakoff—have all been involved in prosecuting Bout or his co-conspirators.
This is Mr. Putin’s idea of establishing moral equivalence between U.S. and Russian justice, but no one outside the Kremlin will fall for that. Sergei Magnitsky died in a Russian prison in 2009, at the age of 37, having been jailed for investigating fraud, theft and corruption by Russian officials in their treatment of his client, Hermitage Capital, an investment firm preposterously accused of tax evasion.
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The Magnitsky Act Needs to Be Strengthened
The list of 18 names released Friday by the U.S. Treasury Department connected to the Sergei Magnitsky Act elicits a number of reactions. For starters, the U.S. has finally taken concrete action to address the Russian government’s atrocious human rights situation. Credit for this, however, lies with the Congress, not the administration of U.S. President Barack Obama, who was opposed to the legislation. But Obama had no choice but to sign it into law last December because the Magnitsky Act was linked to lifting of the Jackson-Vanik amendment, which Obama very much wanted.
It is important for European states to follow the U.S. lead and pass similar legislation. After all, Russian officials travel more to Europe and keep more of their assets there than they do in the U.S. The Magnitsky Act is an important signal to Russian officials involved in human rights abuses to show that their days of impunity are over, at least outside of Russia. But it is also important for cleaning up Western institutions, so they are not complicit in laundering ill-gotten gains of corrupt Russian officials.
As for the list itself, it is too short. There should have been many more names of people who deserve to have their assets frozen and visas denied for their involvement in human rights abuses, in the Magnitsky case and others. That the legislation passed by Congress last year called for one list meant that the Treasury Department needed to have sufficient evidence to freeze a suspect’s assets to stand up to a court challenge; denying visas is much easier and not subject to challenge. Had there been two public lists — one for asset freezes and another for visa denials — the latter presumably would have been much longer. Congress should amend the legislation to create two lists, making it easier to target more human rights abusers with a visa ban even if their assets aren’t frozen.
Nonetheless, my disappointment with the small size of the initial Magnitsky list is offset by several important factors. First, there are additional names on a classified list, as permitted by the legislation. Although there is already one leak — Chechen leader Ramzan Kadyrov, as reported in the New York Times — and bound to be more leaks in the future, we don’t know for sure how many Russians are on the classified list. But uncertainty isn’t necessarily bad. Russian officials involved in human rights abuses should wonder whether they are on the list. Russian officials might also think twice before committing future abuses, knowing that if they were to do so, they, too, could wind up on the list. This could serve as an important deterrent to future human rights abuses.
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