Posts Tagged ‘obama’
US Senate’s ‘Magnitsky’ bill could keep names secret
Reuters
A draft proposal to penalize Russian officials for human rights abuses has been rewritten in the Senate to let the U.S. government keep secret some names on the list of abusers, congressional aides said on Monday.
The reworked Senate version, which could still change, upset some supporters of the legislation to create what is known as the “Magnitsky list.” They said that keeping part of the proposed list secret would neuter the effect of the bill, which is aimed at exposing human rights violators in Russia.
The House of Representatives Foreign Affairs Committee this month approved the “Sergei Magnitsky Rule of Law Accountability Act,” named for a 37-year-old anti-corruption lawyer who worked for the equity fund Hermitage Capital. His 2009 death after a year in Russian jails spooked investors and blackened Russia’s image abroad.
The measure would require the United States to deny visas and freeze the U.S. assets of Russians linked to Magnitsky’s death. The bill as originally written in both the House and Senate would make public the list of offenders and broaden it to include other abusers of human rights in Russia.
A reworked draft circulating in the Senate and obtained by Reuters would allow the list to “contain a classified annex if the Secretary (of State) determines that it is necessary for the national security interests of the United States to do so.”
William Browder, CEO of Hermitage Capital, told Reuters he suspected the “classified annex” provision had been inserted at the request of the Obama administration to water down the bill and so avoid offending the Russian government, which opposes the measure.
“The administration is trying to gut the bill, because they’ve been against it from the start. They are trying to make nice with the Russians,” Browder said in a phone conversation from London.
The administration of President Barack Obama argues the bill is unnecessary because the administration has already imposed visa restrictions on some Russians believed to have been involved in Magnitsky’s death. But it has kept their names quiet.
Backers of the Magnitsky bill want the list of human rights violators made public both to shame those on the list and to keep them from doing business with U.S. financial institutions.
The White House is also anxious to keep the push for sanctions on human rights abusers in Russia from slowing down efforts to get congressional approval allowing “permanent normal trade relations” with Russia this year.
Senator Ben Cardin, a Democrat, is the main sponsor of the Magnitsky bill in the Senate, but there was no comment from his office on the draft bill on Monday. The legislation was scheduled to have a vote on Tuesday in the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.
However, Senate aides said at least one member of the committee may request on Tuesday that the vote be postponed until the committee’s next business meeting, but no date for that has been set.
A Senate Republican aide said there is concern that having part of the list be classified would make steps like the asset freeze unenforceable.
“How can an individual’s assets be frozen, if his or her name cannot be disclosed to financial institutions?” the aide asked. Republicans would try to amend the bill to at least require a justification to Congress for each person put on the classified list, the aide said.
Magnitsky was jailed in 2008 on charges of tax evasion and fraud. His colleagues say these were fabricated by police investigators whom he had accused of stealing $230 million from the state through fraudulent tax returns. The Kremlin’s own human rights council said in 2011 that he was probably beaten to death. займ на карту срочно без отказа hairy women https://zp-pdl.com https://zp-pdl.com/apply-for-payday-loan-online.php онлайн займы
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FPI Bulletin: Mr. President, Drop the Russian Reset
President Obama and Russian President Vladimir Putin met this morning on the sidelines of the G-20 Economic Summit in Mexico. Their bilateral meeting, however, came not only after Russian internal security services recently harassed, detained, and interrogated key political opposition leaders in response to large anti-government protests in Moscow, but also as the Kremlin continues its support of Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad’s bloody campaign against opposition groups and civilians.
For over two years, the Obama administration has argued that its policy of “resetting” relations with Russia would lead to the Kremlin’s strong cooperation on a broad range of international issues. However, as the Foreign Policy Initiative has argued, it is clear that the Russian Reset has failed to fully yield the promised results.
Moscow continues to shield the Assad regime in the U.N. Security Council, and bolster Assad with air defenses and other military means. It opposes imposing crippling sanctions against Iran, even as Iranian efforts are bringing it ever closer to nuclear weapons-making capability. It continually excuses North Korea’s nuclear and ballistic missile provocations. More recently, the Kremlin has threatened retaliation if Congress passes the Sergei Magnitsky Rule of Law Accountability Act. Named after an anti-corruption lawyer who died after being tortured in a Russian prison, the Magnitsky Act would impose a set of wide-ranging sanctions against Russian officials responsible for internal human rights violations and corruption.
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Punish the Russian abusers
Washington Post
PRESIDENT OBAMA’S hopes of forging a partnership with Vladimir Putin after his return to the Russian presidency appear to be fading fast. With a meeting between the two presidents due Monday, Russia is rebuffing U.S. appeals for cooperation in stopping the massacres in Syria, while continuing to supply the regime of Bashar al-Assad with weapons. Meanwhile the Kremlin is cracking down on Russians seeking democratic reform or fighting corruption. This month a prominent journalist was forced to flee the country after a senior government official reportedly threatened to kill him.
Apart from occasional public expressions of exasperation, the administration isn’t reacting much to the cold wind from Moscow. Instead it is pressing Congress to pass a piece of legislation much sought by Mr. Putin: repeal of the 1974 Jackson-Vanik amendment, which conditions trade preferences for Russia on free emigration. On its face the repeal makes sense; if the law is not changed, U.S. companies will be disadvantaged when Russia joins the World Trade Organization this summer. But a bill that grants Russia trade preferences and removes human rights conditions hardly seems the right response to Mr. Putin’s recent behavior.
That’s why momentum in Congress appears to be swinging behind a bipartisan initiative to couple the Jackson-Vanik repeal with a new human rights provision. The Magnitsky act, whose prime author has been Sen. Benjamin Cardin (D-Md.), would sanction Russian officials “responsible for extrajudicial killings, torture, or other gross violations of internationally recognized human rights.”
The bill is named after Sergei Magnitsky, a lawyer who uncovered a $230 million embezzlement scheme by Russia tax and interior ministry officials, then was imprisoned by those same officials and subjected to mistreatment that led to his death. The bill is due to be taken up Tuesday by the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and could later be attached to the Russia trade bill under a deal struck between Finance Committee Chairman Max Baucus (D-Mont.) and Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.).
The appeal of the legislation is its sharp focus: It will affect only those found to be involved in Mr. Magnitsky’s death or the mistreatment of other Russians fighting corruption or abuses of human rights. It would punish people like the senior law enforcement official who allegedly threatened to kill Sergei Sokolov of the Novaya Gazeta newspaper, then appoint himself investigator of the crime. Those sanctioned will be denied the U.S. visas they prize, and their dollar bank accounts — often used to siphon illicit gains out of the country — will be frozen. Importantly, their names will be published, which could make them pariahs elsewhere in the West.
Aware that the Magnitsky bill is needed to pass the trade legislation, the administration has been seeking to gut the former by introducing language that would allow the State Department to waive sanctions or the publication of names on national security grounds. Some waiver authority may be appropriate if it is narrowly cast; senators are considering a provision that would allow the names of some of those sanctioned to be classified temporarily on a case-by-case basis. What’s most important is that Congress send Mr. Putin and his cadres the message that their lawless behavior will have consequences. онлайн займы срочный займ на карту онлайн https://zp-pdl.com https://zp-pdl.com/get-quick-online-payday-loan-now.php быстрые займы на карту
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Obama set to press Putin on Syria at G20
After a week when it sometimes felt as if the cold war had never ended, Barack Obama will finally get some quiet time on Monday with Vladimir Putin to press the new Russian president on the crisis in Syria.
With senior diplomats from both countries trading unusually aggressive barbs in recent days, Mr Obama plans to use a meeting on the sidelines of the G20 summit in Mexico to privately test whether the US and Russia can find common ground on Syria, according to senior US officials.
The first encounter between the two presidents since Mr Putin’s return to presidential office will be a critical showdown in the diplomacy of the Syrian crisis. But it also will provide an indication of where US-Russia relations are headed under a leader who has a notoriously sceptical view of US power – and who declined to attend last month’s G8 summit at Camp David, a move many interpreted as a snub.
Mr Obama faces the delicate task of trying to forge a good working relationship with Mr Putin while Congress is moving close to passing the Magnitsky bill, which criticises Russia’s human rights record.
Complicating matters even more, Mr Obama is in the midst of an election campaign in which his Republican opponent is looking to pounce on any signs of concessions.
“The Magnitsky case … supports my point that we are in for much more difficult times in the relationship with the US,” says Alexei Pushkov, chairman of the Russian parliament’s foreign affairs committee.
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Living with Putin, again
On the margin of the G20 summit later this month Russia’s new (but also old) president, Vladimir Putin, will meet America’s Barack Obama for the first time since his election in March. The atmosphere is likely to be chilly. That is as it should be, for since his decision last autumn to return to the Kremlin, Mr Putin has been stridently negative and anti-Western, most recently over Syria (see article). Such behaviour demands a stiff response from the West.
When Mr Obama came to power, his administration talked of a “reset” in relations with Russia. This new, friendlier approach had some useful consequences. It enabled America to negotiate and ratify a strategic arms-reduction treaty. It helped to bring about a slightly more constructive Russian attitude to Iran’s nuclear ambitions. And it secured Russia’s imminent entry into the World Trade Organisation (WTO). Just as with China a decade ago, WTO membership should press Russia to compete more openly and fairly in world markets and to abide more closely by international trade rules.
But the reset was based in part on two misplaced hopes: that Dmitry Medvedev, who had been lent the presidency for one term by Mr Putin in 2008, would genuinely take charge of the country, and that some in his government had sound liberalising, pro-Western instincts. Those hopes were dashed by Mr Putin’s swatting aside of Mr Medvedev last September to allow his own return to the Kremlin, the rigging of elections, his crackdown on Moscow’s protesters and his new Nyet posture.
This should not lead to a total rupture with Russia. Constructive engagement should continue on the economic front. With the oil price falling, stronger economic ties to the West could help to create a business constituency inside Russia that sees the need for greater liberalisation to keep the economy growing. The West should certainly look at introducing reasonable visa rules for Russian businesspeople (Britain’s are absurdly tough). Other cold-war relics, such as America’s Jackson-Vanik trade restrictions, should also go. And why not dangle in front of the bauble-loving Mr Putin the prospect of Russian membership of the OECD rich-country club? Or a free-trade agreement with the European Union?
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Vladimir Putin steps out
NEXT week Vladimir Putin and Barack Obama will meet again. In July 2009, the only time the two have met before, Mr Putin—then Russia’s prime minister, now its president—gave the American president an earful on the insults Russia had suffered from America. Mr Putin thinks that the conciliatory steps he took in his first term, especially after September 11th 2001, encountered American aggression: the “orange” revolution in Ukraine, Western support for Georgia’s Mikheil Saakashvili, a missile-defence system. As Fyodor Lukyanov, editor of Russia in Global Affairs, says, Mr Putin is “sincerely anti-American,” not because of his KGB past, but because of “his experiences with Bush-era America”.
The “reset” by the Obama administration in early 2009 was meant to respond to this by letting bygones be bygones. Mr Obama and his advisers, who included the present American ambassador to Moscow, Michael McFaul, hoped that the reset would return the focus of relations to the countries’ shared interests. It coincided with some achievements: a new treaty reducing nuclear arsenals, greater co-operation on sanctions against Iran, an agreement to allow supplies for the war in Afghanistan to pass through Russia and Central Asia. The then Russian president, Dmitry Medvedev, has even described the past three years as “the best period in US-Russia relations in history”.
But is it over? It was never clear if Moscow really believed in the premise of the reset. For many in the Russian foreign-policy establishment, says Angela Stent of Georgetown University, the reset was a one-sided “course correction,” in which Washington came to understand that it had not been treating Moscow properly. Moreover, Mr Putin cannot resist—now, as ever—forceful and confrontational gestures, such as his hostile speech at a security conference in Munich in 2007 or his attempt to blame Hillary Clinton, the secretary of state, for the winter protests in Moscow. Changes in bilateral relations have been largely cosmetic. And that has added to the frustration over, for example, Mr Putin’s backing for Syria’s government or a senior Russian general’s statement that the country did not rule out the possibility of a nuclear first strike against missile-defence sites.
The spirit of co-operation that the reset was supposed to engender is being tested by the grim news from Syria and fresh talks on Iran’s nuclear programme in Moscow next week, as well as by the meeting between Mr Putin and Mr Obama on the margins of the G20 summit in Mexico. The most immediate issue is Syria. The Americans and Europeans want Russia to support a managed transition, in which President Bashar Assad would leave power but some of the underlying structures linked to his rule would remain in place. Yet Moscow is resistant to anything that resembles regime change, and is also more pessimistic about what might follow Mr Assad. Moreover Russia’s continued intransigence on Syria, says Robert Malley of the International Crisis Group, has value merely by giving the Kremlin a central part in resolving the crisis. The Russians know that if they give in to Western pressure on Syria “their role deflates considerably”, as the situation would no longer be under their control.
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Syria Crisis and Putin’s Return Chill U.S. Ties With Russia
Sitting beside President Obama this spring, the president of Russia gushed that “these were perhaps the best three years of relations between Russia and the United States over the last decade.” Two and a half months later, those halcyon days of friendship look like a distant memory.
Gone is Dmitri A. Medvedev, the optimistic president who collaborated with Mr. Obama and celebrated their partnership in March. In his place is Vladimir V. Putin, the grim former K.G.B. colonel whose return to the Kremlin has ushered in a frostier relationship freighted by an impasse over Syria and complicated by fractious domestic politics in both countries.
The tension over Syria has been exacerbated by an accusation by Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton on Tuesday that Russia is supplying attack helicopters to the government of President Bashar al-Assad as it tries to crush an uprising. Russia’s foreign minister, Sergey V. Lavrov, rejected the assertions on Wednesday, saying that Moscow was supplying only defensive weapons and countering that the United States was arming the region.
The back-and-forth underscored the limits of Mr. Obama’s ability to “reset” ties between the two countries, as he resolved to do when he arrived in office. He has signed an arms control treaty, expanded supply lines to Afghanistan through Russian territory, secured Moscow’s support for sanctions on Iran and helped bring Russia into the World Trade Organization. But officials in both capitals noted this week that the two countries still operated on fundamentally different sets of values and interests.
The souring relations come as Mr. Obama and Mr. Putin are preparing to meet for the first time as presidents next week on the sidelines of a summit meeting in Mexico. With Mr. Obama being accused by Mitt Romney, his Republican presidential opponent, of going soft on Russia and Mr. Putin turning to anti-American statements in response to street protests in Moscow, the Mexico meeting is being seen as a test of whether the reset has run its course.
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U.S. Won’t Oppose Russia Sanctions That Risk Putin Reprisal
The U.S. administration will no longer seek to prevent Congress from passing a bill targeting human-rights offenders in Russia, a step that President Vladimir Putin has warned would spark retaliation and damage ties.
The House Foreign Affairs Committee will today consider legislation that would impose U.S. travel and financial curbs on any official abusing human rights in Russia, including 60 people suspected of involvement in the death of anti-corruption lawyer Sergei Magnitsky in a Moscow jail in 2009. This will be followed at a later date by a vote in Congress on the measure.
“You’d be hard pressed to find anyone who would bet against Congress expressing their concerns on the Magnitsky matter in some way,” U.S. Trade Representative Ron Kirk said today in Moscow. “It’s important to work with Congress on an appropriate mandatory response to that.”
President Barack Obama’s administration is seeking to repeal trade restrictions with Russia to prevent U.S. companies from being penalized once Russian membership of the World Trade Organization takes effect later this year. A bipartisan group of senators has made a repeal of the 1974 Jackson-Vanik amendment conditional on imposing sanctions on Russian officials for human-rights violations.
Such a law would be “a gross interference in Russian internal affairs and, of course, it won’t have any positive effect on U.S.-Russian ties, to put it mildly,” Konstantin Dolgov, the Foreign Ministry’s human-rights representative, told reporters in Moscow on May 15. Russia in April warned it would retaliate with unspecified measures against the law.
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Russia warns of retaliation for U.S. Magnitsky bill
Russia is prepared to retaliate if the U.S. Congress passes the Magnitsky bill, which would freeze assets of and deny U.S. visas to Russian officials linked to human rights abuses, President Vladimir Putin’s top foreign adviser said Tuesday.
“We would very much like to avoid it,” Yuri Ushakov said. “But if this new anti-Russian law is adopted, then of course that demands measures in response.”
Ushakov’s comments came in an otherwise upbeat briefing on a meeting between Putin and President Obama set for June in Mexico. The Obama administration has been resisting the legislation, introduced by Sen. Benjamin L. Cardin (D-Md.), viewing it as too provocative, even as the State Department has acted on its own to refuse entry to Russian officials associated with the Magnitsky case.
But in a recent interview, Cardin said he was sure the bill would pass, adding that he thinks the administration is preparing to accept the legislation if it is paired with another bill granting Russia normal trade-relation status. That is required under the terms of Russia’s accession to the World Trade Organization, one of the central achievements of Obama’s “reset” of relations with Moscow.
The administration has apparently realized that it cannot stop the Magnitsky bill and will have to deal with the anger of the Russian leadership. If Ushakov’s remarks were designed to encourage a presidential veto of the bill, they are unlikely to succeed, given the difficulty the White House would face in killing a human rights measure. It could come out of committee as early as next month, according to a congressional official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the issue.
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