Stop the Untouchables. Justice for Sergei Magnitsky.

Pass the Magnitsky Bill

Huffington Post

I don’t often agree with Elliott Abrams against the Obama Administration — but the Magnitsky bill creates strange bedfellows.

The bill is named after a young Russian lawyer, who was tortured and died in prison for trying to blow the whistle on government fraud. It would impose travel bans to the U.S. and financial sanctions on anyone responsible for extrajudicial killings, torture or other gross violations of human-rights against individuals trying to defend human rights or who are seeking to expose illegal activity carried out by officials of the Russian government.

Sounds pretty important in a country that has become one of the leading murderers of journalists, and that is trail blazing the 21st century version of authoritarianism at home, and support for noxious regimes like Syria abroad. And by pinpointing sanctions against those carrying out abuse, it takes a page out of the smart sanctions book that has improved our leverage against countries by letting us target the real wrongdoers, not the general public.

But the Magnitsky bill is even more vital. The Administration wants Russia to join the World Trade Organization. To do that, we need to drop the Cold War Jackson-Vanik legislation that tied trade to allowing Jews and those persecuted by the former Soviet Union to emigrate — since linking issues that way is against WTO rules. This bill lets us get at human rights in Russia another way.

The Administration isn’t supportive — and that’s a real missed opportunity. Research on organizations like the WTO show that they allow outside countries to exercise immense leverage on domestic issues — but only during the negotiation stage. In other words, we can use the WTO to push Russia for some real reforms in its rule of law — but as soon as they are in, we lose that leverage.