Posts Tagged ‘posthumous’
Why Russia’s Attempt to Convict a Dead Man Matters
Today — as though more evidence were required to demonstrate the upside-down state of human rights and the rule of law in Russia — the country’s prosecutors resume their efforts to convict a dead whistleblower of the very corruption he exposed. The posthumous trial of Sergei Magnitsky has properly been called “grim comedy” by a group of French legislators, and it is only the most recent — and patently absurd — element of the Russian government’s strategy to cover up fraud, theft, and human rights violations committed by its own high-ranking officials.
Magnitsky uncovered the scheme — which involved officials from six senior Russian ministries and deprived Russian taxpayers of over $230 million — while working in Moscow as a tax attorney for Hermitage Capital Management, an international investment fund based in London. In 2008, he testified against the officials responsible, and was subsequently arrested and detained at their behest without bail or trial. He refused to recant even as his health deteriorated, he was denied medical treatment, and he died in jail in November 2009 at the age of 37. An investigation into his death — and into allegations that he was badly beaten in prison — was abruptly dropped this week.
Russian authorities continue to insist that he was complicit in the fraud, and they have begun inventing new crimes of which to accuse him in an attempt to further undermine his credibility. Magnitsky is now under posthumous investigation for illegally purchasing shares of Russian energy giant Gazprom, despite the fact the transaction was approved years ago by the Russian Federal Securities Commission. As well, Russian law enforcement revealed last month that it may hold him responsible for the country’s 1998 default for supposedly interfering with a $4.8-billion transfer from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York to the Central Bank of Russia. However, none of these transparently self-serving allegations change the truth that Sergei Magnitsky blew the whistle on widespread corruption among powerful people, and paid for it with his life. Indeed, given the ongoing legal proceedings and smear campaign, even that price now appears to be insufficient.
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Magnitsky’s Defense Requests Recusal of Prosecutor as Posthumous Trial Begins
Moscow’s Tverskoi District Court began proceedings into the posthumous tax evasion trial against deceased lawyer Sergei Magnitsky on Friday.
Prosecutors say Magnitsky, who died in a pretrial detention facility in 2009, acted as an accomplice to Hermitage Capital and the fund’s director, William Browder, in a tax evasion scheme that saw the men steal $230 million from the state budget. The allegations were made shortly after Magnitsky himself accused tax officials of stealing the $230 million by using fake tax refunds.
At the very beginning of Friday’s hearing, Magnitsky’s defense lawyers asked to recuse the prosecutor, Mikhail Reznicheno, citing the fact that he’d given defense lawyers limited time to read 60 volumes of case materials, the BBC’s Russian service reported.
Magnitsky’s defense lawyers also asked prosecutors to clarify the procedure for a trial against a dead person, requesting that the Tverskoi District Court submit a request for such clarification to the Constitutional Court, which earlier issued a decree stating that posthumous trials violate the presumption of innocence until proven guilty.
“There was no reason for the investigation. I believe the case was re-opened only because of an incorrect understanding of the decree of the Consitutional Court,” Nikolai Gerasimov, a lawyer for Magnitsky, said in comments carried by Lenta.ru.
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Russia rules Magnitsky was not abused
Russian authorities, showing no signs of declaring a truce with critics at home or abroad, took a swipe at both Tuesday by ruling that no crime was committed in the death of Sergei Magnitsky, a lawyer whose treatment prompted the U.S. Congress to impose sanctions on corrupt officials here.
The finding by the country’s top investigative body contradicted those of a Russian presidential commission, which concluded that Magnitsky was abused and denied medical treatment before his death, and a private investigation by his Western employer, which found evidence he had been tortured.
“He was beaten,” Valery Borshchev, a member of the presidential commission, told the Interfax news agency Tuesday. “There is a death certificate stating that he had sustained a closed head injury.”
Borshchev said he would demand a new investigation. “This defiant act threatens basic and fundamental human rights in Russia,” he said.
Human rights and other nongovernmental organizations have been uneasily waiting to find out how they will fare in this environment. A law requiring groups that receive funds from abroad to register as foreign agents went into effect in November. Last month, President Vladimir Putin reminded the authorities that it should be enforced, according to news reports.
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Russia finds no evidence of torture in Sergei Magnitsky case
Russian investigators found no evidence of violence against a lawyer who died in custody after accusing officials and police officers of running a multimillion-dollar tax refund scam, and have ended their probe, officials said Tuesday.
Sergei Magnitsky, who worked as a legal advisor for the Hermitage Capital Management investment fund in Moscow, died in 2009 of heart insufficiency and brain and lung edema resulting from diabetes and hepatitis while in pretrial detention on tax charges, the Russian Investigative Committee said on its website.
Human rights groups had described Magnitsky’s death as suspicious and alleged that he was tortured after his 2008 arrest, denied medical treatment and beaten in the final hours of his life. Magnitsky’s arrest had followed his allegations that officials engaged in tax fraud had embezzled $230 million from state coffers.
“During Magnitsky’s stay in investigation prisons no special conditions were created for keeping him in custody different from the keeping of other prisoners under investigation, no pressure, no physical violence or torture was applied on him,” the committee’s statement said. “Thus in the course of the criminal case investigation no objective data of crimes against Sergei Magnitsky was obtained.”
The case led to a U.S. measure, the Sergei Magnitsky Rule of Law Accountability Act, signed by President Obama in December, which imposed visa restrictions and froze the U.S. bank accounts of some Russian officials. Moscow responded by banning adoption of Russian orphans by American couples.
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Russia drops inquiry into death of Sergei Magnitsky
Investigators have dropped an inquiry into the death in jail of Sergei Magnitsky, stating that the whistleblowing lawyer’s agonising death, which became an international scandal, was not the result of malpractice.
“A decision has been taken to end the criminal case because of the absence of a crime,” the state Investigative Committee said. “No pressure was exerted on him, nor was there any physical violence or torture.”
Magnitsky was imprisoned for 11 months without trial in Moscow’s notorious Butyrka jail after exposing an alleged embezzlement scam by interior ministry officials. A Kremlin-ordered human rights council since found that he was beaten up immediately before his death, on 16 Novermber 2009, but there has been little effort to punish the officials responsible. As the case unfolded, Magnitsky’s name has become politicised. President Vladimir Putin stated in December that Magnitsky had died from heart problems and not from torture, and state-run television has run a number of smear programmes against him.
“This was expected,” said Magnitsky’s mother, Natalia Magnitskaya, after today’s decision. “I don’t believe that it is possible to obtain justice in Russia today because there are people in power interested in concealing it.”
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Sergei Magnitsky: Russia can’t sweep his death under the carpet
Well, it’s official. Russia’s investigative committee has gone ahead and announced that the investigation into the death in prison of Sergei Magnitsky has been closed. Move along, folks. Nothing to see here.
Magnitsky was a Russian lawyer and father of two who died in November 2009 while being held in pre-trial detention. Before he went to jail, he had just happened to accuse some very powerful people of some very serious tax fraud. Having worked for the global investment advisory firm Hermitage Capital Management at the time of his imprisonment, he was now accused of the very same fraud he had apparently uncovered.
His death became an international scandal and led to the introduction of the Magnitsky Act in the US, which banned people implicated in his death from obtaining US visas, among other restrictions. Russia retaliated with the introduction of the Dima Yakovlev law, named after a Russian orphan who had died while in the care of his adoptive parents in the States. The law banned all adoptions of Russian orphans by Americans.
According to the investigative committee’s official findings, Magnitsky died because he was a very sick man: he was not tortured or treated differently, he was just in poor health. Whether Magnitsky received adequate medical treatment in detention is not mentioned. Both Magnitsky’s family and the human rights activists that have been involved in bringing this case to wider media attention have alleged that Magnitsky did not receive treatment because he wouldn’t testify against his employers.
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IBAHRI expresses concern over the posthumous trial of Sergei Magnitsky, Russia
The International Bar Association’s Human Rights Institute (IBAHRI) expresses concern over the posthumous reopening of criminal proceedings against Sergei Magnitsky, raising several procedural issues. The most salient issues identified by the IBAHRI include:
– The Constitutional Court of the Russian Federation decision of 14 July 2011 does not give law enforcement agencies a basis to pursue or revive charges against a deceased person;
– The rights to choose counsel, prepare a defence case, and be present at one’s trial are enshrined in Article 14(3) of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR). The rights to defence and to a fair trial cannot be exercised by a deceased accused person;
– The entitlement to a fair and public hearing, enshrined in Article 14(1) of the ICCPR, provides that there must be a strong and clear justification for excluding the public and media from the trial proceedings. This expectation is all the stronger in these extraordinary circumstances. The failure to conduct an open process reasonably leads to adverse inferences; and
– Russian courts were made aware of the manner in which Magnitsky was investigated, and the conditions of his detention, in great detail by Magnitsky himself while he was still alive, with no apparent effect.
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The Show Trial of Sergei Magnitsky
Wall Street Journal
It sounds like something out of a Nikolai Gogol story, but it’s true: Sergei Magnitsky, killed by abuse and neglect in a Russian prison at the age of 37, is now on trial more than three years after his death.
On Tuesday a Russian court held the second hearing of a sham trial to convict him posthumously of tax evasion. That hearing was postponed at the request of Magnitsky’s state-appointed defense attorney, who pleaded for more time to prepare a defense.
Assuming this gesture was not part of the charade, he needn’t have bothered. As in the show trials of the 1930s, the outcome is assured. The whole point of putting this dead man on trial is to secure a conviction and rob the victim of his status as an international martyr. Last year the U.S. passed the Magnitsky Act, which sanctions and bans from travel to the U.S. Russians implicated in his murder. Some countries in Europe may do the same.
The Putin government has no interest in seeing Magnitsky’s name cleared. Yet it is revealing that Moscow feels bound to produce a verdict. Even Vladimir Putin’s Russia seeks to adopt the trappings if not the substance of criminal justice.
Magnitsky’s real “crime,” the one for which he was killed, was to expose official corruption and the theft of state assets after his client, investor Bill Browder of Hermitage Capital, was expelled from Russia in 2005 and forced to liquidate his holdings there. Perhaps conscious of the absurdity of trying a corpse, last week prosecutors added Mr. Browder to the dock in absentia. So the world will be treated to the spectacle of a trial of a dead man and a foreigner living in Britain—all to improve the image of Putin’s regime.
The Russian state, in its benevolence, granted the defense attorney the time he requested this week. But there can be no stay of execution for Sergei Magnitsky, and his trial deserves the full measure of the world’s contempt. быстрые займы на карту займ онлайн https://zp-pdl.com https://zp-pdl.com/best-payday-loans.php займ срочно без отказов и проверок
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Sky News: The trial of Magnitsky – “dancing on the grave”
Today the court will hear the case of the Russian whistleblower lawyer, accused of tax fraud. This is despite the fact that the defendant had died over three years ago! Sergei Magnitsky died in prison under suspicious circumstances. This is the first posthumous court case in Russian history.
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