Posts Tagged ‘washington post’
Washington’s weak responses to Putin’s crackdowns set a bad example
Anything Russia can do, you can do, too. That is the message Washington is sending to repressive, power-hungry governments around the world. With each step that President Vladimir Putin takes to restrict the freedoms of the Russian people, like-minded leaders watch U.S. (and European) reactions and, seeing weak responses, are emboldened to abuse human rights in a similar manner.
Putin’s crackdown on human rights is motivated by his desire to quell the protest movement that arose in December 2011, when hundreds of thousands of Russians took to the streets to demonstrate against unfair parliamentary elections. In March 2012, protesters were further incensed by the unfair elections that returned Putin to the presidency.
In response, the Russian government has developed new repressive tools and technologies — most notably, using the law as a weapon — that Putin eagerly uses as he attempts to reassert and consolidate his power and position. And U.S. objections to his abuses are plaintive, feeble and ignored.
To Russia’s south, Azerbaijan is taking note. President Ilham Aliyev is standing for reelection in October and hopes to avoid the unrest that has dogged Putin. With Russia’s actions seeming to effectively enfeeble the opposition, Aliyev has preemptively followed that oppressive model.
To discourage protests, Russia a year ago increased the fine for participating in unsanctioned rallies from a maximum of 1,000 rubles ($31.50) to a ceiling of 300,000 rubles ($9,450). Last month, Human Rights Watch reported that Azerbaijan’s “maximum jail sentence for violating rules for organizing, holding, and attending unauthorized assemblies increased from 15 days to two months.”
In July, in a move designed to stifle free speech, Russia once again made libel a criminal offense. Predictably, Azerbaijan is in the process of expanding the definitions of “insult” and “slander” and plans to include online statements in the scope of its libel laws. The effect on free speech would be chilling.
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Russia, E.U. tussle over ‘Magnitsky list’ visa restrictions
Russian and European Union officials meeting at a summit Tuesday discussed liberalizing visa rules for many Russians, an issue that brought objections from politicians concerned about human rights abuses.
Russia wants 15,000 government employees who have official passports to be given the right to enter Europe without visas, but some members of the European Parliament say that would give human rights violators free entry as well. On Tuesday, as the summit was taking place in Yekaterinburg, nearly 50 parliament members sent a letter to E.U. foreign and interior ministers saying they would oppose the agreement unless it came with a list of excluded officials.
The letter was in support of a European version of the U.S. Magnitsky Act, which imposes visa sanctions on Russians associated with the death of Sergei Magnitsky, a Russian lawyer who died in jail after he accused police and tax officials of a $230 million tax fraud.
In a vote last October, the European Parliament urged E.U. countries to adopt their own “Magnitsky lists,” which none has done so far. Russia has made it clear such actions would come with retaliation. After the U.S. law was passed, Russia banned American adoptions of Russian orphans.
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More bad news from the Middle East
It has been apparent for some time that when Secretary of State John Kerry (in his current spot or while in the Senate) gets pumped up about something (e.g. Bashar al-Assad is a reformer, get Turkey into the Middle East “peace process,” develop a special relationship with the Chinese government) it is probably a very bad idea, and when he is adamantly opposed to something (e.g. the Magnitsky human rights legislation, more sanctions on Iran, restoring defense spending), it is in all likelihood essential to do. He is, not unlike Jimmy Carter, the perfect embodiment of rotten judgment.
So when he commences to fawn over the newly named Palestinian Authority prime minister, Rami Hamdallah, you know he’s a bad replacement for Salam Fayyad.
Jonathan Schanzer of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies concurs. He tells me, “Hamdallah is an obscure academic with no experience in governing. His appointment marks a consolidation of power for Mahmoud Abbas. He is expected to be a ‘yes man’ — the opposite of Salam Fayyad, who openly disagreed with the Palestinian president on core issues, including transparency and institution building.” What is really going on here is the consolidation of corrupt Fatah’s authority. (Fayyad was never a Fatah member, which in large part accounted for his independence and the antipathy he generated.) Schanzer observes, “Unfortunately, Abbas is not only getting a weak prime minister. He is also weakening the institution of the position. This means less checks and balances in the Palestinian political system. Abbas, who is already four years past the end of his legal presidential term, has taken the institution of the presidency back to the future.”
It is noteworthy that the most significant accomplishment regarding the PA in the past few years was the ejection of Yasser Arafat and the division of authority between the president and prime minister. Now, as Schanzer notes, Abbas’s “ironclad grip on Palestinian politics rivals that of Yasser Arafat in his prime.”
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Former Bush Advisor: Keep Calm and Submit to Putin
It’s hard to imagine how someone could be more discredited regarding Russia than by being intimately associated with both the George W. Bush and Richard M. Nixon administrations. That’s the case with Russia pundit Paul J. Saunders: he worked for Bush as a key Russia advisor and now works for the Center for the National Interest, known as the Nixon Center until 2011.
Recall Bush infamously looked in Vladimir Putin’s eyes, glimpsed his soul, and declared him trustworthy. And hosted a Russian war criminal in the Oval Office, before Putin invaded Georgia and annexed two huge chunks of territory. The Center for the National Interest is actually run by a Russian, Dimitri Simes, another discredited figure who has urged the same disgraceful policy of appeasement towards Russia that has been embraced by the disastrously failed “reset” policy of Barack Obama.
In the May 23 Washington Post, Saunders published an editorial fully supportive of the Obama reset. The column is one of the more dishonest and outrageous pieces of writing about Russia I’ve come across in my career of monitoring Russian affairs.
Saunders argues that the United States should not oppose dictatorship in Russia until Russian troops begin “massing on the country’s Western border” and “opposition activists are being executed by the hundreds.” Yes, really.
He denies that dissidents are being sent to psychiatric wards, Siberia, or being subjected to show trials like those that occurred in Soviet times, and therefore urges Americans to do as Obama says and to thank their lucky stars, because things are just fine in Russia as far as Americans are allowed to be concerned.
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Interpol snubs Russia on request to arrest human rights critic William Browder
Interpol has refused a request from Russia to put William Browder, a U.S.-born investment banker who has organized a worldwide campaign to punish Russia for human rights abuses, on its arrest list. Browder was a major proponent of the U.S. Magnitsky law, which imposes visa and financial sanctions on Russians deemed to have violated human rights.
The law was passed in honor of Sergei Magnitsky, a lawyer for Browder’s Hermitage Capital Fund, who died in detention in Moscow after he uncovered a $230 million tax fraud, implicated Russian tax and police officers and was charged by them with the crime instead. Russia has accused Browder of involvement in fraud, as well.
In a statement posted on its Web site Friday evening, Interpol said the request to arrest Browder was politically motivated. On Saturday, Browder described the decision as a major humiliation for President Vladimir Putin.
“That an independent police organization would say the entire Magnitsky case is politically motivated is extremely significant,” he said in a telephone interview. Alexei Pushkov, head of parliament’s international affairs decision, criticized the decision in comments to the Interfax news agency.
“Declaring a case political without a thorough investigation is a political position rather than an investigative body’s position,” he said Saturday. hairy girl срочный займ на карту https://zp-pdl.com/online-payday-loans-cash-advances.php https://zp-pdl.com/get-a-next-business-day-payday-loan.php займ срочно без отказов и проверок
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The president again turns a blind eye to Russia’s misdeeds
According to the State Department, the government of the Russian republic of Chechnya under Ramzan Kadyrov “has committed and continues to commit such serious human rights violations and abuses as extrajudicial killing, torture, disappearances and rape.” Mr. Kadyrov, State added in an August 2011 letter, “has been implicated personally” in “the killing of U.S. citizen Anna Politkovskaya, a journalist who had reported widely on human rights abuses in Chechnya.”
Yet when the Obama administration released on Friday a list of Russian officials who are to be subject to a visa ban and an asset freeze because of their complicity in human rights crimes, Mr. Kadyrov was not on it. The list of names — mandated by Congress in legislation that the administration strongly resisted — is a step toward holding the regime of Vladimir Putin accountable for its abuses, but it also is another example of President Obama’s questionable catering to the Kremlin.
Sixteen of the 18 names on the sanctions list are connected to Sergei Magnitsky, a whistleblowing Russian lawyer who died after being imprisoned and abused; it was his case that prompted Congress to pass the law last year. Under its provisions, the administration is required to identify Russian officials complicit in the persecution of Mr. Magnitsky, as well as in other human rights crimes, and publicly sanction them.
Some advocates of the law wondered why the list was so short; some 60 Russian officials have been connected to Mr. Magnitsky’s case alone, not to mention other notorious cases such as that of Ms. Politkovskaya, who was gunned down on Mr. Putin’s birthday in 2006. There are some good reasons: An asset freeze by the Treasury Department, which can be subject to legal challenge, has to meet a relatively high standard of evidence.
Administration officials concede, however, that some names were left off the list for political reasons. One is Mr. Kadyrov, who reportedly is included in a classified annex of officials who are to be denied visas but not be subject to an asset freeze. We were told that the administration did not want to target senior officeholders, out of concern that Russian reciprocation would ban members of Congress, Cabinet members or state governors (the equivalent of Mr. Kadyrov) from visiting Russia, further complicating U.S.-Russian relations at a time when Mr. Obama is still seeking to strike deals with Mr. Putin. As it is, the Kremlin issued a sanctions list over the weekend that included several officials of the George W. Bush administration.
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Piercing the secrecy of offshore tax havens
A New York hedge fund manager allegedly swindles $12 million from a prominent Baltimore family. An Indiana couple is accused of bilking hundreds of customers by charging for free trials of cosmetic products. A financial manager in Texas promises 23-percent returns but absconds with $33.5 million of his investors’ money in a classic Ponzi scheme.
All three cases have one thing in common: money that ended up in offshore accounts and trusts set up in tax havens around the world.
The existence of the trusts surfaced during a joint examination of the offshore world by The Washington Post and the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, a D.C-based nonprofit news organization. ICIJ obtained 2.5 million records of more than 120,000 companies and trusts created by two offshore companies, Commonwealth Trust Ltd. (CTL) in the British Virgin Islands and Portcullis TrustNet, which operates mostly in Asia and the Cook Islands, a South Pacific nation. The records were obtained by Gerard Ryle, ICIJ’s director, as a result of an investigation he conducted in Australia.
Many people use the offshore world for legitimate purposes, for legal tax shelters or to smooth the way for international trade. Overseas havens vaulted into public consciousness last year with stories about Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney’s accounts in the Cayman Islands. Recent coverage of the Cyprus banking crisis has thrust the issue back into the spotlight.
U.S. citizens are permitted to move money offshore as long as they report their account information to the Internal Revenue Service. But there have long been concerns that much of the money is not reported and bleeds tax revenue from governments worldwide. Recently, aspects of the offshore world came under assault after whistleblowers alerted the IRS to thousands of unreported U.S. accounts in Swiss banks, resulting in an amnesty offer to violators who paid billions in fines to the U.S. government.
The records reviewed by The Post and ICIJ expose how havens in the South Pacific and Caribbean in some cases have become sanctuaries for individuals seeking to conceal their activities from investigators and investors.
Among the 4,000 U.S. individuals listed in the records, at least 30 are American citizens accused in lawsuits or criminal cases of fraud, money laundering or other serious financial misconduct.
They include billionaire hedge fund manager Raj Rajaratnam, who was convicted in 2011 in one of the biggest insider trading scandals in U.S. history, and Paul A. Bilzerian, one of the most famed corporate raiders of the 1980s, who was convicted of securities fraud.
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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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Resetting Russian reset, and the rest of Obama’s foreign policy
While the president and new Secretary of State John Kerry are resetting reset, they would be wise to take a look at Freedom House’s new report on Russia. It is a sober assessment of Vladimir Putin’s Russia and where U.S. policy should go from here.
Authors David Kramer and Susan Corke explain:
Over the past year, driven by a fear that the democratic spirit of the Arab awakening would creep toward Russia, Putin and his adherents have launched a series of initiatives designed to close down civil society and eliminate any and all potential threats to his grip on power. New legislation has been crafted to increase criminal penalties for opposition protesters, censor and control the internet, taint nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) that receive overseas funding as “foreign agents,” prohibit U.S. funding of Russian NGOs involved in “political activities,” drastically expand the definition of treason, and recriminalize libel and slander. Arrests, arbitrary detentions, and home raids targeting opposition figures are occurring on a level not seen since Soviet times. One opposition figure was even kidnapped from Kyiv, where he was seeking asylum, and brought back to Russia to be prosecuted based on a coerced confession. A Putin critic living in Britain, Aleksandr Perepilichny, died under mysterious circumstances last November, recalling the poisoning death of Aleksandr Litvinenko in 2006. Also during 2012, the Russian government forced the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) out of the country; the National Democratic Institute and the International Republican Institute soon followed. The legal and practical space for civil society and political opposition in Russia is closing quickly.
They remind us that “Putinism is rooted in corruption. The regime uses the pliant legal system as an instrument to suppress all forms of opposition and protect the corrupt division of economic resources among loyalists. The most senior officials and business magnates are given control over valuable sectors of the economy, especially extractive industries. Such short-sighted perversion of economic forces almost ensures the system’s decline, preventing competition.”
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