Russia’s trial of DEAD man gets go-ahead for next week

Daily Mail

Russia’s bid to put a dead man on trial descended into farce today as even a state-appointed lawyer urged that the case against Sergei Magnitsky should be put on hold and sent back to the prosecutor’s office.

But the move was rejected by the judge and now the bizarre posthumous trial will go ahead on 11 March.
The 37-year-old lawyer and anti-corruption campaigner died in a Moscow detention centre after being arrested by senior law enforcement officials he had accused of large-scale $230 million financial corruption.

No-one has been found guilty of his death – and now he will be the first dead defendant in Russian or Soviet history to go on trial.

Magnitsky’s family refused to co-operate with the ‘macabre’ case, with his mother Natalya dubbing the case immoral, illegal and designed to turn her whistleblower son into a criminal.

Lawyer Nikolai Gerasimov appointed by the state against her will to act for her dead son demanded in a closed-doors session that the trial judge Igor Alisov send the case back to prosecutors due to legal inaccuracies. The bid was refused last night.

In a surprise move another lawyer Alexander Molokhov, claiming to represent Magnitsky’s friends, said he was refused permission to take part in the controversial hearing.

He claimed that unlike the Magnitsky family, he wanted ‘not to ignore the trial but to torpedo it from the inside’.

The judge had refused his bid ‘to show the absurdity of this trial and to prove Magnitsky is not guilty in court – not somewhere in the street’, he told journalists.

The judge had refused his bid ‘to show the absurdity of this trial and to prove Magnitsky is not guilty in court not somewhere in the street’, he told journalists.

The judge yesterday spent at least five hours considering the move to send the case back to prosecutors before refusing the demand, which will be seen as Magnitsky supporters as proof of the court’s bias.
It was unclear last night whether empty chairs would represent the two missing defendants – one dead, and the other in London.

Mr Magnitsky, who was 37 when he died, represented London-based Hermitage Capital Management (HCM) and uncovered what he said was a web of corruption involving Russian tax officials and police officers.

In retaliation for his reporting his findings to authorities, he was arrested on charges of organising tax evasion for company executives. On November 16th 2009, he died of pancreatitis in a Moscow prison after being tortured and denied proper medical treatment.

Mr Magnitsky’s case became an international cause celebre and was seen by many as an example of Russian corruption still persisting under president Vladimir Putin.

Last December, the US Senate passed the Magnitsky Act, which blacklisted Russian officials accused of bribery and corruption, ensuring they could not get visas.

In retaliation to the US, Putin signed a Russian law barring Americans from adopting Russian orphans – a move critics said simply victimised innocent children.

The judge yesterday spent at least five hours considering the move to send the case back to prosecutors, a step which would delay it, causing embarrassment to the Russian authorities.

He failed by evening in Moscow to set a trial date or clarify whether empty chairs would represent the two missing defendants – one dead, and the other in London.

Another lawyer was appointed by the state to represent Magnitsky’s boss, William Browder, now living in London. Browder, head of Hermitage Capital, Magnitsky’s former employer, has warned that Vladimir Putin’s authorities have sunk Russia ‘to an entirely new level of depravity’.

He stressed: ‘Even during the worst moments of Stalin’s purges they never prosecuted dead people.’

Amnesty International dubbed the trial ‘farcical but also deeply sinister’. It amounted to ‘a dangerous precedent that could lead to a deterioration on the human rights situation in Russia’.

Magnitsky’s relatives demanded that lawyers should not seek to represent the whistleblower – who died in November 2009 – against their wishes, asserting that a posthumous trial flouts the law.

‘A lawyer is not allowed to take an instruction in a case that is clearly unlawful, and to take a position against the will of the client,’ said a complaint written by Magnitsky’s relatives, distributed by his former employer Hermitage Capital, headed by Browder.

‘The assertion by prosecutors that the case was initiated at the request from the relatives is a lie,’ they said.

But Kirill Goncharov, acting for Browder – against his wishes – said: ‘We do not have a right to refuse. You must understand us. We can lose our status of a lawyer.’

He appealed to Browder’s real lawyers to contact him so he could help defend his ‘client’.

In another move, described as sinister by the Magnitsky family, the dead lawyer’s brother-in-law Andrei Zharikov was summoned for questioning by the Russian Interior Ministry, and then had a gagging order slapped on him. This interrogation was ‘one more attempt to suppress Magnisky’s family in psychological way’, said Hermitage Capital.

In December President Barack Obama signed a new law dubbed the ‘The Magnitsky Act’ which bars Russian officials implicated in Magnitsky’s death from travelling to the United States US and allows for any American assets to be frozen.

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