Stop the Untouchables. Justice for Sergei Magnitsky.

Garry Kasparov: Out Of The Country, But Not Out Of The Picture

Radio Free Europe

Garry Kasparov may be staying away from his homeland for a while, but he has no intention of steering clear of Russian politics.

The chess grandmaster turned opposition figure does not mince his words when he speaks of what he calls the “Hitleresque essence” of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s regime.

“These days, judges rubber-stamp sentences,” he told RFE/RL’s Russian Service by telephone from New York. “Police commanders give the order to beat and hound people, to arrest them. Governors in the regions can do whatever they like and act like all-powerful lords in their domains.”

In one of his first interviews since announcing last week that he “will refrain from returning” to Russia “for the time being” for fear of a politically motivated prosecution, Kasparov said that he is focusing his efforts on trying to get European countries to adopt sanctions against senior Russian officials implicated in human-rights abuses – similar to the so-called Magnitsky list adopted by the United States in 2012.

The U.S. law is named after whistle-blowing Russian lawyer Sergei Magnitsky, who died in custody in 2009 after exposing a massive tax fraud that implicated Russian officials.

According to Kasparov, such sanctions are effective at capturing the attention of Russia’s ruling elite.