Posts Tagged ‘obama’
Obama’s broken commitment to human rights in Russia
Like James “Whitey” Bulger, Vladimir Putin likes to make the bodies bounce.
Bulger is the reputed mob boss on trial for multiple murders in Boston. After Bulger learned that a confederate was singing to the FBI, according to some recent testimony, Bulger shot him, and shot him, and shot him, until “his body was bouncing off the ground.”
Putin is the president of Russia, who last week saw to the conviction for tax evasion of lawyer Sergei Magnitsky, who blew the whistle on massive corruption among Putin’s underlings. Magnitsky died three years ago, when he was beaten and denied treatment in prison. But Putin can’t stop shooting.
The ghoulish conviction is just one stop on a breathtaking rollback of rights and freedoms Putin has engineered since reclaiming the presidency in May 2012. The clampdown has been remarkable for its speed and comprehensiveness — and for President Obama’s apparent utter indifference to it.
Russia has been slipping since 2004, when Putin, in his first term, began dismantling laws that had allowed for political opposition. But in the past year, “the Russian government has unleashed a crackdown on civil society unprecedented in the country’s post-Soviet history,” as Human Rights Watch documented in a 76-page report this spring.
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US blasts Russia over Magnitsky conviction
The Obama administration and lawmakers lashed out at Russia on Thursday after the country sentenced a dead whistle-blower on tax evasion charges in the country’s first posthumous trial.
President Obama signed human rights legislation named after Sergei Magnitsky last year. The legislation places travel and financial restrictions on Russians whom the State Department identifies as human rights violators.
“We are disappointed by the unprecedented posthumous criminal conviction against Sergei Magnitsky,” said State Department spokeswoman Jen Psaki. “The trial was a discredit to the efforts of those who continue to seek justice in his case. Despite widely publicized credible evidence of criminal conduct resulting in Magnitsky’s death, the authorities have failed to prosecute those responsible.
“We continue to call for full accountability for all those responsible for Magnitsky’s wrongful death and will continue to support the efforts of those in Russia who seek to hold those individuals accountable.”
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So much for the reset
The news that Russia has no plans to hand over former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden casts an important light on the “reset” policy that has defined US–Russian relations for almost five years.
The Snowden case should be relatively straightforward. He has violated the laws of the US. His passport has been cancelled, and he cannot legally leave the transit area of Moscow’s Sheremetyevo Airport. The US has asked for his return. In the last five years, the US has returned 1,700 Russian citizens to Russia at the request of the government. Of these, 500 were criminal deportations.
Despite this, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said that Snowden had the right to “fly in any direction” from the transit zone. This type of response was exactly what the reset policy was supposed to prevent. The policy was based on the notion that President Bush had mishandled Russia and responsiveness to Russian concerns would produce positive results. The policy, however, had a serious flaw. It failed to account for the nature of the Russian system and the psychology of the Russian leaders.
In making policy toward Russia, the US has concentrated on what are called “deliverables” — treaties, agreements, working groups. In the interest of obtaining these deliverables, the US deliberately downplayed Russian violations of human rights. When Putin was elected president of Russia for the third time in elections marked by massive falsification, Obama congratulated him. At the 2009 Moscow Summit, Obama praised the “extraordinary work” that Putin had done in Russia. He described Putin as “sincere, just and deeply interested in the interests of the Russian people.” This was done despite credible reports that while running Russia, Putin had amassed a personal fortune of nearly $40 billion and was the richest man in Europe.
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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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U.S. Magnitsky List Near-Finalized
The U.S. government is expected this week to finalize the list of Russian officials to be punished for suspected human rights abuses under the Magnitsky Act. But the final version of the list, due to be released by Saturday, may become a sticking point between Congress and the State Department.
Congress is apprehensive about the White House’s decision to release only 15 names so as not to fuel tensions with the Kremlin, Kommersant reported, citing a source in Congress who did not specify why the number was 15. Representative James McGovern, a Massachusetts Democrat who was one of the authors of the law, sent to Obama’s administration on Friday his own list of 280 names.
McGovern said a shortlist such as the one by the White House might produce a conflict between the State Department and Congress, and the latter would insist on gradually updating the list. “If the final version is short, we will have to pass a new, tougher amendment,” he told Kommersant in an interview published Monday.
The law is aimed to punish Russian officials implicated in whistle-blowing lawyer Sergei Magnitsky’s death in jail in 2009, a year after he had accused officials of embezzling $230 million in state funds. Officials placed on the list would be banned from entering the U.S., and their assets there would be frozen.
According to the Magnitsky Act, signed into law in December, the list of officials must be sent to Congress by April 13. U.S. President Barack Obama said in a memorandum Friday that he had delegated functions for creating the list to the U.S. Treasury and State Departments.
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President Obama Should Uphold the Magnitsky Act’s Legislative Intent
The Foundry – Heritage Foundation
Next week, the Obama Administration faces an important foreign policy decision in U.S. relations with Russia—how to champion human rights and the rule of law. The State Department is trying to avoid a gust of chilling wind from Moscow.
However, the last thing the Administration should do is show weakness to Moscow or subvert the will of Congress as stipulated in the recent Sergei Magnitsky Rule of Law Accountability Act of 2012 signed by President Obama last December.
Under the Magnitsky Act, the State Department is supposed to submit a list of corrupt Russian officials who are gross violators of human rights. The U.S. will then ban these violators’ travel to the U.S. and freeze any assets they hold in American banks. The State Department has until April 13 to compile such a list for implementation.
The Magnitsky Act’s intent is to name and shame the corrupt officials responsible for whistleblower Sergei Magnitsky’s brutal death in 2009 and send a message that the U.S. takes human rights violations in Russia seriously.
However, one of the law’s co-sponsors doubts Obama’s resolve to implement the list. Representative Jim McGovern (D–MA) created his own list of officials as he fears for how the Magnitsky Act will be enforced and whether the Administration’s list will have enough teeth. McGovern’s list includes 280 names, including Yuri Chaika, the Prosecutor General of Russia who closed the investigation into Magintsky’s death; the head of the Russian Investigative Committee; and numerous secret policy and law enforcement officials involved in this and other cases.
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Will Putin’s friends be on the Magnitsky list?
Next week, the State Department is expected to release a list of Russian human rights violators who could be subject to visa bans and asset freezes in the United States, but Congress is worried that State will avoid naming senior Russian officials in an effort to placate the Kremlin.
The list is required to be sent to Congress by April 13, according to the Sergei Magnitsky Rule of Law Accountability Act of 2012, which was passed by both chambers of Congress and signed by President Barack Obama last December. Lawmakers and NGOs working on the Magnitsky list want the State Department to include top Russian officials and several close associates of Russian President Vladimir Putin.
The State Department is using a narrow interpretation of the law, arguing that a higher standard of evidence is required for legal reasons. But some lawmakers involved in the issue believe the narrower scope is meant to placate Moscow.
“We want to ensure that the administration carries out the law in the same spirit that Congress passed it. We didn’t do this for a press release; we did this because of the deteriorating human rights situation in Russia,” said Rep. Jim McGovern (D-MA), an original sponsor of the bill, in an interview.
McGovern sent the administration his own list of 280 Russian officials (PDF) he believes should be included in the State Department’s Magnitsky list. Many of them are directly related to the case of Magnitsky, the anti-corruption lawyer who died in Russian prison after allegedly being tortured, and some are close personal associates of Putin.
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Managing Magnitsky in a Managed Democracy
Last Tuesday, the Investigative Committee announced that it had closed the investigation of the death of Sergei Magnitsky because they couldn’t identify an “event of crime.” I was immediately inundated with calls from journalists asking if I was surprised or disappointed and what our next move would be.
I was certainly not surprised. Russia is a managed democracy, and the Magnitsky case is also managed. It has become obvious that the highest levels of government have decided to protect the people who stole hundreds of millions of dollars from the government and who killed the whistleblower who exposed this crime.
In late 2007, Magnitsky discovered a crime in progress, and his client, Hermitage Capital, reported it on Dec. 3, 2007, before any tax money was stolen. In the summer of 2008, Magnitsky documented that $230 million was stolen with the help of government officials, and Hermitage reported this as well. The two complaints consisted of hundreds of pages of supporting documents, all of which were ignored by the Russian government.
Prosecutors then accused Magnitsky of being a tax cheat and of committing the very theft that he reported. It based its case solely on the testimony of the people whom Magnitsky accused of corruption and extortion. Prosecutors named Magnitsky’s alleged co-conspirators, but conveniently they were all dead.
When Magnitsky died in November 2009, we were first told that he died from pancreatitis, a condition that he was repeatedly denied treatment for while he was detained for almost a year in pretrial detention. Then, after people began to question why his pancreatitis wasn’t treated and ask whether this was intentional, we were told his death was a result of an unpredictable heart failure. This is the reason there were no arrests in Magnitsky’s death, we were told, and this became the basis for closing the inquiry into his death.
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