Posts Tagged ‘medvedev’
The Concealed Battle to Run Russia
The New York Review of Books
by Amy Knight
Despite their professed mutual respect, Russia’s president, Dmitry Medvedev, and his prime minister, Vladimir Putin, apparently cannot agree on one question—which of them will be running for the Russian presidency in March 2012. Over a year ago Putin told foreign journalists that he and Medvedev would at some point “sit down and come to an agreement” about who would be the presidential nominee of United Russia, the overwhelmingly pro-Kremlin party, in the next election. (He repeated the same promise in a recent interview with Larry King on CNN.) But that moment has yet to come, and in the meantime, both men are provoking speculation about their possible candidacies.
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Plea for end to Khodorkovsky ‘persecution’
A group of western politicians has urged Dmitry Medvedev, Russian president, to “end the persecution” of Mikhail Khodorkovsky, the jailed Yukos oil tycoon, just days before a Moscow judge begins reading the verdict in his second trial.
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Text of letter to President Medvedev
His Excellency Dmitry Medvedev
President of the Russian Federation
Dear Mr. President
We, the undersigned, believe that Russia can and should be a positive force in shaping the development of our increasingly interconnected world. As a major global power, a bridge between East and West and a country with a long and proud history in virtually every field of human endeavour, Russia can exert tremendous positive influence on the world of tomorrow.
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Battle against corruption is an uphill struggle
Economist Intelligence Unit
SUMMARY
Corruption has become arguably Russia’s biggest problem, hampering its ability to recover from the 2008-09 economic crisis and preventing meaningful diversification of the economy away from natural resources. The crisis hit Russia hard, and its economy would also be likely to fare badly in any future global downturn. There are signs that the president, Dmitry Medvedev, is gradually moving against bribery, graft and outright pilfering of national resources by corrupt bureaucrats. However, this is a major challenge, and there is a high risk that progress will be insufficient to tackle this major obstacle to Russia’s economic development.
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Promises, Promises
The Moscow Times
It must be nice to be president. Could you imagine if every half hour Ekho Moskvy radio announced, instead of the news: “Tomorrow at this time you’ll be able to hear the news on this station. We’ve set a goal and a plan: to provide you the news. It’ll be incredible. Amazing. Fantastic. The world’s best. And, don’t forget, tomorrow. We promise.” How long could that continue before everyone stopped listening to Ekho Moskvy?
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Magnitsky Deserves Justice
VOA News.com
This month marks the one-year anniversary of the death of Russian lawyer Sergei Magnitsky, who died from apparent medical neglect after 12 months in pre-trial detention.
In 2008, Mr. Magnitsky implicated Russian officials in what he called a massive scheme to defraud the government of $230 million. Authorities arrested Mr. Magnitsky and accused him and his client, Hermitage Capital, of evading taxes. According to Mr. Magnitsky, investigators and prison officials pressured him to withdraw his complaint and testify against Hermitage Capital. He refused to cooperate and was subsequently transferred from one Moscow prison to another with worse conditions. After being denied medical attention for pancreatic problems and enduring what human rights activists have described as torturous conditions for almost a year, Sergei Magnitsky died November 16th, 2009.
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Crime and unjust punishment in Russia
The Lancet
Tom Parfitt
A year after the controversial death in a Moscow detention centre of Sergei Magnitsky—a 37-year-old lawyer who was denied vital medical treatment—Russia is promising an overhaul of its antiquated prison system. But will the reforms bring real change to health-care provision?
It was 1830 h on November 16, 2009, when Sergei Magnitsky was transferred to the Matrosskaya Tishina detention centre in Moscow. The 37-year-old lawyer had been healthy when he was arrested a year earlier on fraud charges that colleagues said were trumped-up in revenge for his work for Hermitage, an international investment fund that passed evidence about corrupt officials to Russian media. Yet within 4 hours of arriving at Matrosskaya Tishina (Sailors’ Rest), Magnitsky was dead.
In the past year the Magnitsky Affair, as it is known in Russia, has become emblematic of the country’s woeful human rights record and its—sometimes wilful—neglect of the sick in prison. 6 weeks after Magnitsky was found lifeless in his cell, the public oversight commission (ONK) for Moscow’s pretrial detention centres published a scathing report describing the events that led up to his death.
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Dancing with the big boys
Warsaw – In its foreign policy Poland has chosen realism over romanticism
CRITICS and supporters of Polish foreign policy agree on one thing. Relations with Russia have been transformed in the past three years. But into what?
To the critics, a planned visit by Dmitry Medvedev, Russia’s president, to Warsaw in December epitomises surrender, stemming from naivety or cynicism. They see Poland scampering after big countries such as Russia, France and Germany, rather like a teenager desperate to hang out with adults, heedless of the national interest. According to the leader of the opposition (and former prime minister), Jaroslaw Kaczynski, Poland has become a Russian-German condominium. Some in his Law and Justice party blame Russian dirty deeds for the plane crash in Smolensk in April that killed his brother Lech, the Polish president, and scores of aides and officials. Two party members have just been in Washington, DC, trying to win American support for an investigation into what they believe is a huge cover-up.
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Russia and the Rule of Law
EU Russia Centre
by Anthony Brenton, a former UK ambassador to Russia
The inadequacies of Russia’s legal and judicial systems have recently been very much on display. The second trial of fallen oligarch Mikhail Khodorkovsky, which looks no less politically motivated than the first, is approaching its close. We have just marked the first anniversary of the death in custody of Russian lawyer, Sergei Magnitsky, imprisoned for a year without charge for exposing deep corruption in the Russian Interior Ministry. Yet another respected investigative journalist has been beaten up, and another opposition oligarch found himself subject to the aggressive attention of the Tax Police. Russia has fallen to 154th place (out of 178) in Transparency International’s ranking of countries in terms of the perceived corruption of their public officials (including police and judges), placing Russia well below eg Ukraine, Kazakhstan and Nigeria. Close to 30% of the cases currently awaiting attention by the European court of Human Rights now concern Russia, far more than for any other country.
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