Posts Tagged ‘maccain’
Alekseyeva hopes Europe will follow example of U.S. with “Magnitsky law”
Russian human rights activists have backed the decision made by the U.S. Senate Committee on International Affairs to approve the “Magnitsky bill,” which envisions visa and financial restrictions on some Russian officials.
“It’s a very good decision. I hope some European countries will follow the example of the U.S.,” Moscow Helsinki Group Chairman Lyudmila Alekseyeva told Interfax on Wednesday.
Alekseyeva said no real investigation into the death in a Moscow detention facility of Hermitage Capital lawyer Sergei Magnitsky has been conducted in Russia. She said the decision made by the U.S. Senate committee is a signal from the international community to the Russian authorities.
“I believe it’s an international verdict,” Alekseyeva said.
Alekseyeva said she does not believe measures taken by Russia in response will be effective.
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Prosecuting the Dead
In 897 AD in what was called “the Cadaver Synod”, Pope Formosus was tried for various violations of Church laws. He was found guilty, his edicts were annulled, his robes were taken from him, and three fingers on his right hand were severed, before the former Pope was thrown in the Tiber River. Bizarrely, Pope Formosus had died of natural causes several months earlier. They prosecuted a dead man. Fast forward over a thousand years to 2012. Russia is about to put on trial a dead man, Sergei Magnitsky, a lawyer, who died in prison from the effects of his imprisonment and torture by the Russian Government in November 2009.
Magnitsky’s death has caused universal condemnation by world leaders, international organizations, such as the European Union, as well as human rights groups. His crime was exposing a massive tax fraud scheme by the Russian government and officials within the Medvedev/Putin regime in the amount of over $230 million dollars. Not content to leave Magnitsky in peace, the Russian government has hounded his family and harassed his mother, Natalia Magnitskaya. They are even going to bring charges in absentia against Magnitsky’s former employer, William Browder, a British citizen, of the Hermitage Capital Fund.
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