Posts Tagged ‘new york times’
Clinton Tells Russia That Sanctions Will Soon End
Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton pledged Saturday that the United States would soon lift cold-war-era trade sanctions on Russia, but she did not address human rights legislation in Congress that has so far stalled passage, infuriated the Kremlin and become an unexpected issue in the American presidential race.
Attending the annual Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit meeting here in place of the campaigning President Obama, Mrs. Clinton welcomed Russia’s accession to the World Trade Organization last month. And she said that the United States must now normalize trade relations so that American businesses can reap the benefits of Russia’s membership, including lower tariffs for American products.
Although the sanctions included in the 1974 law known as Jackson-Vanik are waived each year and have no practical effect, they violate W.T.O. rules, which could allow Russia to retaliate against American businesses.
The effort to grant Russia normal trade status, however, has become entangled in legislation that would punish Russian officials accused of abusing human rights, denying them visas and freezing their assets. That has raised doubts that any agreement on lifting the Jackson-Vanik provisions can be reached before the November election.
The human rights bill, which has bipartisan support in both houses of Congress, is named after Sergei Magnitsky, a lawyer who died in prison in 2009 after being prosecuted on charges that his supporters argue were manufactured to cover up official corruption.
Mitt Romney, the Republican presidential challenger, injected the issue into the campaign last week by issuing a statement saying that, as president, he would normalize trade with Russia only if the Magnitsky bill were enacted. The Obama administration, by contrast, has opposed the bill as too expansive and lobbied against mixing it with the trade issue, while expressing support for addressing rights abuses in Russia in some way.
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U.S. Companies Worry About Effect of Russia Joining W.T.O.
After two decades of negotiations, Russia will finally join the World Trade Organization on Wednesday. The lower trade barriers that come along with membership will open up new opportunities for foreign companies to do business in Russia.
But American companies are guaranteed no such advantages — and may even face higher Russian tariffs than their competitors from other countries.
Because of broader policy concerns about the Kremlin’s crackdown on dissidents and its support for rogue governments, Congress has balked at the Obama administration’s request to grant Russia permanent normal trade relation status. That status is important since the W.T.O. requires that any country that seeks to benefit from it must apply the same trade rules to all member countries.
Major American exporters to Russia, like Caterpillar, Deere and General Electric, are worried about the potential impact on their business from the Congressional inaction. Across all sectors of the economy, Russia will lower import tariffs to 7 percent, from about 15 percent today, for the 155 countries in the trade organization. Although Russian officials say they do not have any immediate intention of applying discriminatory tariffs against American companies, they could legally do so at any time.
Russia was the last major economy that was not part of the trade group, and joining is expected to be a boon for Russian consumers and businesses. Exporting companies in Europe, Asia and the United States eagerly await open access to a population of 142 million people with growing incomes and an expanding middle class.
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Trade Relations With Russia
Congress was supposed to pass a bill to improve trade relations with Russia before it left town for summer recess. That did not happen, and American companies that do business in Russia, or want to, may find themselves at a disadvantage with foreign competitors once Russia joins the World Trade Organization on Aug. 22.
The issue hangs on an anachronism called the Jackson-Vanik amendment, which was enacted in 1974 to pressure Moscow to grant Jews the freedom to leave the country by effectively imposing higher tariffs on imports from the Soviet Union. Two decades later, Jewish emigration is no longer a problem, but the law is.
Since 1992, American presidents have waived application of the law and granted Russia temporary, normal trade status, which allows lower import duties. With Russia becoming the last major economy to win admission to the W.T.O., that status needs to be made permanent. If Jackson-Vanik is not lifted, the United States will be in violation of W.T.O. rules. And American exporters will have to pay higher tariffs to Russia to enter its markets than European and Asian competitors do. The fallout for American workers should be obvious.
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How Not to Pass a Bill
Among the many things the House never got around to doing before shutting down for the summer was holding a vote on a bill that would have granted permanent normal trade relations to Russia.
Please don’t turn the page.
Yes, compared with its inability to pass a farm bill, this may sound like small potatoes. But it is a near-perfect illustration of the way the House Republican leadership has largely abdicated its responsibility to get useful things done — as opposed to, say, conducting votes to repeal Obamacare a few dozen times.
There wasn’t much controversy over the Russia bill. Business supported it because American companies could then take advantage of Russia’s imminent entry into the World Trade Organization. It would have required repealing the old Jackson-Vanik amendment, which links trade to the emigration of Russian Jews. But that’s been a nonissue for decades. The Senate was lined up to pass the bill quickly once the House acted.
Many Russian opposition figures, like Garry Kasparov, supported it for a different reason. It had been paired with something called the Sergei Magnitsky Rule of Law Accountability Act. Magnitsky, you may recall, was the young Russian lawyer who tried to expose a huge tax fraud involving a number of high-ranking officials. His efforts led to his imprisonment, where he was grossly mistreated and deprived of medical treatment. And he died. The Magnitsky act would prevent his jailers — and other human rights abusers — from entering the country, and it would have frozen their assets as well.
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Russian Activist Accuses Chief Investigator of Secret European Holdings
A Russian blogger and anticorruption activist who helped inspire street protests in Moscow last winter accused Russia’s chief federal investigator on Thursday of secretly owning real estate and other investments in Europe.
The allegation touched on the personal dealings of Aleksandr I. Bastrykin, a close aide to President Vladimir V. Putin and the director of the Investigative Committee, a high-level agency in the Russian government that coordinates criminal inquiries. It was apparently the most forceful retort yet by the opposition to a number of new laws strengthening the security services.
These laws, passed partly in response to the activism of the blogger, Aleksei A. Navalny, will be enforced by Mr. Bastrykin.
On his blog, Mr. Navalny provided documents indicating that Mr. Bastrykin has a residence permit and owns real estate in the Czech Republic.
Mr. Navalny wrote that the documents seemed to contradict Mr. Bastrykin’s denial of business interests abroad, which came in response to a parliamentary investigation in 2008.
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Senate Panel Advances Trade Bill With Russia
A Senate committee advanced a measure on Wednesday to normalize trade relations with Russia for the first time since the fall of the Soviet Union while also sanctioning officials implicated in human rights abuses.
With the measure passed in the Senate Finance Committee on a unanimous vote, lawmakers dispensed with two decades of resistance to lifting cold war-era restrictions under the so-called Jackson-Vanik law. But senators insisted on the human rights sanctions to send a message to President Vladimir V. Putin as Moscow under his new term cracks down on dissent.
The trade move has been a priority of President Obama’s as he seeks to improve Russian-American relations, but his administration unsuccessfully lobbied against adding the sanctions, arguing that it was already taking action on human rights. The sanctions have provoked deep anger in Moscow at a time when Mr. Obama has been seeking help from Mr. Putin in resolving the crisis in Syria.
Russian lawmakers visited Washington last week to lobby against the sanctions, and on Tuesday, Moscow repeated its plan to respond tit for tat.
“There is a whole range of situations in the U.S. where senior and other officials of this country’s ministries and agencies are responsible for systematic and severe human rights violations,” Sergei Ryabkov, Russia’s deputy foreign minister, told the Interfax news agency.
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In Trade Deal With Russia, U.S. Plans Sanctions for Human Rights Abuses
In the two decades since the end of the cold war, the United States has extended its economic reach to the far corners of the old Communist world, establishing full-fledged trade ties with the likes of Ukraine, Armenia and Kyrgyzstan. Even still-Communist nations like China and Vietnam have been granted full trading status. But not Russia.
That seems about to change. For the first time since the fall of the Soviet Union, a bipartisan coalition in Congress has agreed to normalize trade relations with Russia, the onetime adversary in the long struggle between capitalism and communism. But at a time of renewed tension with Moscow, lawmakers have decided to grant the status with one large caveat — that Russian officials be held responsible for human rights abuses.
Legislation moving through the House and Senate with support from both parties would lift restrictions imposed in the 1970s under the so-called Jackson-Vanik law, permanently establishing normal trade relations with Russia, one of just a handful of nations left in the world still denied them. In doing so, Congress would potentially double Russian-American trade and fulfill a goal that eluded Presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush.
Yet in imposing sanctions for human rights violations, lawmakers are defying not just the Kremlin of Russia’s president, Vladimir V. Putin, but also President Obama, who while embracing the normalization of trade lobbied against mixing the issues. In effect, foreign policy experts said, the legislation represents a judgment by Congress that in his effort to repair relations with Moscow, Mr. Obama has not paid enough attention to freedom and democracy.
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Foreign-Funded Nonprofits in Russia Face New Hurdle
In the latest move to rein in dissent, Russian authorities have introduced a draft law that would require nonprofit organizations that receive financing from outside Russia to publicly declare themselves “foreign agents” — a term that, to Russians, evokes cold war-era espionage and is likely to discredit the organizations’ work in the eyes of the public.
Lawmakers from United Russia, the governing party, have accelerated work on the bill and are scheduling the first of three readings on Friday. If passed, the bill would complement a new law penalizing Russians for taking part in unauthorized protests, which was rushed through Parliament at a similar pace last month.
The bill would also put new burdens on nonprofit groups with foreign financing that are judged to be involved in politics, including annual audits and unannounced checks for the use of “extremist speech” in published materials. Organizations could face fines of as much as 1 million rubles, or $30,000, for violations.
Rights activists have excoriated the proposal as an attempt to discredit their work, arguing that Russian donors are afraid to support organizations that criticize the government, which then leaves them dependent on foreign sources for money.
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As Putin Postpones Meeting Obama, Analysts Seek Political Import
The first meeting between President Obama and President Vladimir V. Putin as the leaders of their respective countries was supposed to be an icebreaker, a moment for two outsize figures to put behind them some of the friction that surrounded the Russian elections two months ago.
But the announcement on Wednesday that Mr. Putin would skip the Group of 8 summit meeting of world leaders next week at Camp David – which Mr. Obama had promoted as an opportunity to “spend time” with Mr. Putin – bewildered foreign policy experts in both countries who have been waiting to see how the two leaders would get on.
During a telephone call on Thursday, Russia’s foreign minister, Sergey V. Lavrov, assured Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton that the cancellation was “not political,” a State Department official said. Other administration officials said they accepted Mr. Putin’s stated reason for canceling his trip – he told Mr. Obama that he had to finish setting up his new cabinet.
In fact, during a meeting last Friday in Moscow with Mr. Obama’s national security adviser, Thomas E. Donilon, which was supposed to set up the Camp David meeting, Mr. Putin had warned that he might have to send his prime minister (and the former president), Dmitri A. Medvedev, in his place, according to a senior administration official with knowledge of the meeting.
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