Stop the Untouchables. Justice for Sergei Magnitsky.

If we kowtow to Putin, his disdain for us grows

The Times

The absurd trial of a dead man is one more reason to stand up to the bully in the Kremlin
Many in Moscow complain that Vladimir Putin no longer takes counsel, that he has gone rogue. But the critics are wrong in one important respect. At his side, whispering in his ear, is the ghost of Franz Kafka.

How else to explain the political decision to prosecute, and find guilty, a dead man, the whistleblowing lawyer Sergei Magnitsky? He had uncovered a tax scam that went almost to the top and so, by the inverted logic of the Iron Law of Putinism, the corpse of Sergei Magnitsky had to be tried and found guilty of tax evasion, as he was last week. He will be unable to do time.

The absurdity of that trial has been compounded by Russian readiness to grant asylum to the renegade National Security Agency contractor, Edward Snowden. Suddenly, cynically, the Russian authorities have decided that whistleblowers, if they are American, deserve the full protection of the State.

Today Alexei Navalny, an anti-corruption campaigner, will hear whether he will be sent to jail for six years on convoluted embezzlement charges involving £400,000 of state-owned timber. It is wrong of course to anticipate the verdict of even such a plainly politically motivated trial. But I will eat my rabbit-fur schapka if Mr Navalny walks free and proceeds, as he hopes, to contest the September elections for Mayor of Moscow.

How will Britain react to his jailing? Almost certainly with head-shaking disappointment. Or perhaps just demure silence. The Magnitsky verdict was assessed by David Lidington, the Foreign Office Minister, as an “exceptional step”. That fell short in capturing the trial’s perverted essence. Britain, he said, was going to make sure it wouldn’t happen again. The nine-year jail term in absentia of William Browder, Magnitsky’s former employer and co-defendant, drew no significant comment from the Government, even though he is a British citizen.

As for poor Alexander Litvinenko, ex-KGB but also a British citizen, poisoned in London, he too is getting short shrift. First, the Foreign Office has withheld documents from Sir Robert Owen, the coroner, on grounds of national security. That made it next to impossible to determine whether the Russian state was involved in his killing (as Litvinenko claimed on his deathbed). Then, last week, the Government blocked the possibility of a public inquiry that would have allowed the coroner to study classified evidence in private. Russian officials are well pleased: Litvinenko’s dirty secrets about Mr Putin have been frozen out of the Anglo-Russian relationship.