Posts Tagged ‘world affairs’
EU Lawmakers Expand Effort to Sanction Russian Rights Abusers
As the US administration readies its first annual report to Congress on the implementation of the Magnitsky Act, the law imposing visa and financial sanctions on Russian human rights abusers, European legislators are preparing a strategy to move forward with their own sanctions package. Last week, the European Parliament hosted the first meeting of the Justice for Sergei Magnitsky Inter-Parliamentary Group, which brings together lawmakers from 13 countries (11 of them from the European Union) and an advisory board that includes representatives from Russia (among them, the author of this blog). The aim of the new coalition is to coordinate between the national parliaments and the European Parliament on the best way to move forward with barring Russian officials implicated in corruption and human rights violations from visiting and stowing their assets in EU member states and Canada.
The Magnitsky Act, passed by the US Congress last year with vast bipartisan majorities (365 to 43 in the House; 92 to 4 in the Senate), was, despite Kremlin assertions to the country, the most pro-Russian law ever adopted in a foreign country. With corruption and political repression being the founding pillars of Russia’s current regime, and with no independent judiciary to protect Russian citizens from abuse, external individual sanctions on those who commit these offenses are the only way to end the impunity. According to a Levada Center poll, 44 percent of Russians support US and EU visa bans on officials who engage in human rights violations, with only 21 percent opposing, and this despite constant attempts by the Putin regime to present individual sanctions against crooks and abusers as “sanctions against Russia”—an insulting equivalence for the country. Leading Russian opposition figures and human rights activists are publicly supporting the Magnitsky sanctions; many of their testimonies have been included in a new book edited by Elena Servettaz, Why Europe Needs a Magnitsky Law, which was presented in European capitals and Washington DC.
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A Rare Case of Justice in Russia
Good news from Russia, politically speaking, is a scarce commodity—especially if it involves opponents of Vladimir Putin. On Thursday, a Moscow City Court judge overturned the extension of pretrial detention for Vladimir Akimenkov, one of 17 people who are currently being held behind bars in the so-called “Bolotnaya case.” According to the government’s version, the mass protests against Putin’s inauguration on Moscow’s Bolotnaya Square on May 6, 2012, turned into “riots.” An independent expert commission established by human rights groups has concluded that the violence was deliberately provoked by the authorities to create a pretext for the subsequent crackdown.
Akimenkov, now 25, was arrested last June on the charges of “participating in riots” and engaging in “violence against representatives of the authorities”—charges that could land him in prison for eight years. The entire case is built on the (constantly changing) “witness testimony” of one police officer by the name of Yegorov. Akimenkov categorically denies the charges, as do most of the other “Bolotnaya prisoners.”
The activist suffers from inborn eye diseases, including a severe myopia, partial atrophy of the eye nerve, and coloboma of the iris. While in detention, he is being denied the necessary medical treatment. His eyesight is steadily worsening—now down to just 10 percent. If not released soon, Akimenkov could go completely blind. But, until now, this did not seem sufficient reason for the authorities to release him on bail before the start of the trial—nor, indeed, did the personal guaranties offered by State Duma members Ilya Ponomarev and Boris Kashin, popular writer Ludmila Ulitskaya, and human rights leaders Ludmila Alekseeva and Lev Ponomarev.
Thursday’s ruling was the first case of a successful appeal in the “Bolotnaya case.” Akimenkov’s attorneys were as surprised as anyone. Now—unless prosecutors appeal—the activist will be released on June 10th, the day his previous arrest expires.
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Ireland Bows to Russia’s Intimidation
If any doubt ever existed that Russia’s newly imposed adoption ban was undertaken not out of genuine concern for the fate of orphans now in the custody of American parents but rather to punish any government that takes a strong line on Russian human rights violators, then recent events in Ireland have just eliminated any such reservations.
On February 27th, Bill Browder, the London-based CEO of Hermitage Capital and the man behind the Sergei Magnitsky Rule of Law Accountability Act, which calls for the sanctioning and banning of Russian officials credibly accused of gross human rights abuses, testified before the Joint Committee on Foreign Affairs of the Irish Parliament (the Oireachtas). As he’s done in Washington and numerous European capitals before, Browder outlined the facts of how his former attorney, Sergei Magnitsky, uncovered a $230 million tax fraud perpetrated by a Russian organized crime syndicate consisting of Interior Ministry, intelligence, and federal tax officials, who used Hermitage Capital’s corporate documents as cover. Magnitsky himself was then arrested for the crime and tortured to death in pretrial detention; his corpse was found in the Matrosskaya Tishina prison hospital, with his arm handcuffed to a radiator, lying a pool of urine. He is now being tried posthumously in Russia, a legal grotesquerie that not even Stalin had the gall to attempt during the Great Terror. And, unless you’ve not bothered to open a newspaper these past several months, the Magnitsky affair has become the most widely reported human rights scandal in Vladimir Putin’s Russia, as well as the driving force behind the eponymous US law, which Putin yesterday described as “imperial” in design at a four-hour marathon press conference.
Following Browder’s testimony, Irish Senator Jim Walsh, a member of the leading center-right party Fianna Fail, drafted a resolution, modeled on what Britain, Holland, Italy, the Council of Europe, and European Parliament have already done, calling on the Irish government to “publicly list the names, deny visas into Ireland, and freeze any assets found in Ireland” of those Russian officials who “were responsible for the false arrest, torture and death” of Magnitsky, “perpetrated or financially benefited from the crimes” that he “uncovered and exposed, and/or participated in the cover up of those responsible for those crimes.” It further called for the passage of an Irish counterpart legislation to the one the US Congress passed last November, and for EU-wide visa sanctions on those officials named as conspirators or accomplices in the affair. The resolution was co-signed by eight members of the Foreign Affairs committee.
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In Plain Sight: The Kremlin’s London Lobby
Although the US-Russian relationship continues to deteriorate in the face of a vengeful Kremlin ban on American adoptions of Russian orphans, Vladimir Putin is still pursuing a strategy of influencing—and infiltrating—European political establishments. Given the amount of capital that Russia and her billionaire oligarchs have invested in the continent, this policy is as much defensive as it is self-interested. The European Commission’s deadly-serious investigation into Gazprom’s monopolistic practices, the beginning of the end of German Ostpolitik, and the ongoing dispute with Russia over the Syria crisis hint at an imminent confrontation between Moscow and EU countries. And while state-owned media outlets turn out anti-American propaganda to match equivalent policy measures, for the time being, Russia is still very much committed to swaying European opinion by using both transparent economic appeals (especially in the energy sector, the Gazprom case notwithstanding) and also the kind of Le Carré–esque skulduggery that was supposed to have vanished with the Cold War.
One recent episode of Moscow’s see-through machinations involved a London-based lobby group Conservative Friends of Russia (CFoR). Launched in August 2012—in the garden of the Russian ambassador to Britain, no less—and shut down in December, CFoR’s brief existence might have gone unnoticed but for two developments. The first was the number of Tory parliamentarians who joined its governance, including Sir Malcolm Rifkind, Margaret Thatcher’s former foreign minister and the current chairman of the Intelligence and Security Committee in the House of Commons. The second was the way CFoR, which presented itself as a “neutral” talk-shop about British-Russian relations, followed slavishly the talking points of the Russian Foreign Ministry. The chairman of CFoR, Richard Royal—a communications specialist at Ladbrokes, the world’s largest retail bookmaker, and a former aide to Tory MPs—even gave an interview to the founder of a notorious neo-Nazi group in Russia in which he spoke about the Caucasus, Russia’s counterterrorism policies, and other matters high on the agenda of any chauvinistic ultranationalist.
Several Tories I spoke to, including one of the MPs formerly attached to the organization, told me they had felt all along that CFoR was little more than a serially embarrassed front for “useful idiots” (his words). Sure enough, the final act of public relations seppuku came on November 23rd when CFoR sent out a press release clumsily attacking Labor MP Chris Bryant, who heads the All Party Parliamentary Group (APPG) on Russia in the House of Commons and who’s known for his tough line against the Kremlin. A photo Bryant posted on an online dating site ten years ago showing him in his underpants was leaked to the tabloid press. Without mentioning his hardheadedness on Russia’s lurch toward totalitarianism, CFoR deployed that image in a press release attacking Bryant’s stewardship of the APPG, which was up for renewal the following week. (He handily won reelection.)
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Kremlin’s Chief Attack Dog Vacations in US
In just one year, Alexander Sidyakin, a member of the Duma from Vladimir Putin’s United Russia party, went from little-known functionary to the regime’s most prominent attack dog on the Russian pro-democracy movement. He has used the parliamentary rostrum to accuse Putin’s opponents of being a “fifth column” and “instigators of mass unrest,” and to stomp on a white ribbon, the symbol of the pro-democracy protests, which he called “a symbol of treason, a color of an exported revolution, which foreign political technologists are trying to impose on us.” He has accused Russian NGOs that advocate for human rights and democratic elections of “being, in one way or another, under the [US] State Department,” because “someone is trying to poke their snotty nose in our affairs.” He has defended the police crackdown on anti-Putin demonstrators in Moscow last May, because, as he put it, “if we allow [the protesters] to dictate their own terms, we will end up with an ‘Arab Spring.’”
Sidyakin’s words were backed up by action: he was the author of two of the most notorious repressive laws signed by Putin last year: the law on public rallies, which raised the maximum fines for “violations” to 300,000 rubles ($9,900—ten times Russia’s average monthly salary), and the law on nongovernmental organizations, which forced Russian NGOs that receive funding from abroad to tag themselves as “foreign agents.” According to Sidyakin, the groups targeted by his law will likely include the anticorruption watchdog Transparency International, the poll-monitoring Golos Association, and Memorial Society—one of Russia’s most respected human rights organizations, founded by Andrei Sakharov. As for the new law on rallies (which, as he boasted, he “wrote personally”), the lawmaker boldly declared that “the right to protest is not absolute.”
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Magnitsky Human Rights Sanctions Advance in Senate, Russia’s Thugs on Notice
Although it has never been difficult to distinguish between genuine opponents of Vladimir Putin’s regime and the bogus “opposition” tasked with imitating political pluralism, some episodes have been especially indicative. One watershed was the 2008 Georgia war, when many supposed opposition leaders supported Putin’s actions and even urged him to be more aggressive (among the few Russian politicians who spoke out against the invasion was Mikhail Kasyanov).
Another litmus test—perhaps an even more important one—is the Magnitsky Act, a US Congressional initiative which seeks to impose a visa ban and asset freeze on Russian officials involved in violating human rights. The bipartisan measure, which this week passed the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in a unanimous vote (after clearing the counterpart committee in the House—also unanimously—on June 7th), is named after Sergei Magnitsky, a Moscow lawyer who was arrested, tortured, and died in prison after uncovering a $230 million tax fraud scheme involving government officials. As well as those implicated in Magnitsky’s persecution and death, the bill covers officials responsible for any “extrajudicial killings, torture, or other gross violations of internationally recognized human rights”, which include the “freedoms of religion, expression, association, and assembly and the rights to a fair trial and democratic elections.”
The Kremlin’s reaction has been predictable—though still astounding in its defense of murderers, swindlers, and thieves. But, for many observers, the behavior of the official “opposition” was even more eye-opening. Ivan Melnikov, the deputy speaker of the Duma and one of the leaders of the Communist Party, joined the Kremlin in defending abusers, accusing the United States of “creating an instrument…to harass Russian citizens who, for one reason or another, are not liked by the American authorities.” On the substance of the case, Melnikov asserted that “Magnitsky is not the end-all of this world”. (After all, what is the death of one man to a party that had killed millions—and not even apologized for it?) Another “opposition” heavyweight, Vladimir Zhirinovsky, the leader of the ultranationalist LDPR party, went even further, accusing Russian citizens who support Western visa sanctions on Putin regime officials of “betraying the national interests of Russia.” Russia’s national interests have been defined in many ways, but the ability of crooks and murderers to vacation and keep their money abroad has, until now, never been one of them.
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Magnitsky Bill Clears First Hurdle in US Congress
On Thursday morning, by a unanimous voice vote, the US House Committee on Foreign Affairs approved a bill that offers a rare example of congressional bipartisanship. The Sergei Magnitsky Rule of Law Accountability Act, cosponsored by leading Republicans and Democrats in both houses of Congress, deals with an issue that the current and previous administrations were too timid (or too calculating) to address seriously: human rights violations in Russia. The bill drew the Kremlin’s attention as no other US congressional initiative has in years—perhaps not since the 1974 Jackson-Vanik amendment, which linked US-Soviet trade to the freedom of emigration. Hours after his inauguration on May 7th, Russia’s reinstated president, Vladimir Putin, signed a decree tasking his diplomats with “preventing the introduction of unilateral extraterritorial sanctions by the United States of America against Russian legal entities and individuals”—a thinly veiled reference to the Magnitsky Act.
Sergei Magnitsky was a Moscow lawyer who died in custody in 2009 after reportedly being tortured and denied access to medical care. A year earlier, he uncovered a $230 million tax fraud scheme—the largest known in Russian history—which involved the previously seized assets of Hermitage Capital Management, an investment fund he was representing. Magnitsky’s testimony implicated several law enforcement officials. The result was his own arrest. Almost three years after Magnitsky’s death, not one of the perpetrators has been punished: on the contrary, a number of interior ministry officials involved in his case have received awards and promotions. Indeed, the most prominent criminal investigation in Russia involving Magnitsky has been, astonishingly, the ongoing posthumous case against him.
The Magnitsky Act, which now advances to the House floor, proposes a targeted visa ban and asset freeze against individuals “responsible for the detention, abuse, or death of Sergei Magnitsky,” as well as for any “extrajudicial killings, torture, or other gross violations of internationally recognized human rights” in Russia. It is in defense of these fine citizens that Putin has mobilized the full force of his diplomacy. Both Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov and the Kremlin’s top foreign policy adviser, Yuri Ushakov, have called the bill “anti-Russian,” and threatened unspecified retaliation. Presumably, all those US officials with retirement savings in Russian banks have been put on notice.
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Man On A Mission: Bill Browder vs. the Kremlin
“There, but for an accident of geography, stands a corpse!” thundered Max Shachtman—once known as Leon Trotsky’s “foreign minister”—in New York City in 1950. By popular account, the line had been cooked up that night by a young Shachtmanite named Irving Howe; it ended the debate between the anti-Stalinist socialist Schachtman and his opponent, Earl Browder, former head of the Communist Party USA, who had been expelled from the party in 1946 at the behest of Moscow Central after suggesting that Soviet Communism and American capitalism might coexist after all.
Browder’s grandson Bill, CEO of Hermitage Capital Management, has continued the family tradition of heretical defiance of the Kremlin and as a result has had an experience that in all its eccentricity defines the malign brutality of Russian political life today.
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The Autumn of the US-Russia Reset
A colleague and I have described the post-Soviet era in Russia as the “age of impunity,” whereby even the most howlingly obvious crimes of man or state are implausibly denied or whitewashed in a manner redolent of Stalinist propaganda. Two such examples have furnished themselves in quick succession in the last month, one relating to the conviction of a notorious Russian arms dealer and the other to a Russian nuclear scientist’s facilitation of Iran’s atom bomb project. Both acts would have spelt the end of the US-Russian “reset” without the added complications of renewed brinkmanship over the placement of a US missile defense shield in Eastern Europe and the drubbing delivered to Vladimir Putin’s United Russia party in a transparently fraudulent parliamentary election on December 4th.
First the arms dealer. On November 2nd, Viktor Bout was sentenced in a New York court of attempting to sell heavy weapons to FARC, Colombia’s Marxist-Leninist terrorist group. Nicknamed the “Merchant of Death” and vaguely the model for Nicolas Cage’s character in the forgettable film Lord of War, Bout was a one-man clearinghouse of post-Soviet munitions for dictators and murderous regimes. There was scarcely a civil war fought in Africa in the 1990s and 2000s—and consequently, a limb dismembered or body decimated—without Bout’s hardware. He was chummy with the indicted war criminal and ex-president of Liberia, Charles Taylor. According to Bout’s biographer, Douglas Farah, the Merchant of Death was also seen schmoozing with Hezbollah in Lebanon in the summer of 2006, just prior to the second Israel-Lebanon War, which saw the Party of God firing Russian-made, armor-piercing antitank weapons that shocked even the IDF in terms of their sophistication and impact.
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