The European Union – Russian Federation human rights
On 17 May 2013, the European Union and the Russian Federation held their seventeenth round of human rights consultations in Brussels, allowing the EU to raise its growing concerns on the developments affecting human rights in the Russian Federation.
Both sides discussed at length the worrying situation of civil society in the Russian Federation, in
particular the wave of restrictive legislation, the recent checks conducted on the basis of the
“foreign agents” law and the ongoing court cases. In that context, the EU confirmed its intention to
continue to follow closely developments affecting NGOs as a whole in the Russian Federation
and expressed among others its concerns at the fining of election monitoring organisation GOLOS
and at the charges brought against ADC Memorial in St Petersburg. Russia expressed openness in
providing detailed clarification as to the implementation of that law and to pursue this dialogue in
more depth on the basis of specific EU observations with the Ministry of Justice in Moscow.
The EU raised a number of specific human rights issues in the Russian Federation, enquired about
the impact of Russia’s efforts to fight against torture and to foster the independence of the
judiciary in light of the recent visit of the UN Special Rapporteur on the independence of judges
and lawyers. The EU asked Russia to ensure that defence lawyers are able to work freely, in
particular in the Northern Caucasus. The EU also called on Russia to refrain from adopting a federal
legislation on “homosexual propaganda”, which it believed could increase discrimination and
violence against LGBTI individuals. Russia shared its concerns on the situation of non-citizens in
the European Union and on the legislation regulating the use of minority languages in education
systems.
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Bill Browder Speech – Oslo Freedom Forum 2013
Bill Browder gave a speech at the Oslo Freedom Forum on 13 May 2013. He was telling delegates about the case of his murdered lawyer Sergei Magnitsky, the ongoing cover-up of his death and how they are now putting Sergei himself on trial posthumously.
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Oslo Journal, Part II
A few years ago, I met a man named Bill at a gathering. “I’m sorry, what was your last name again?” I said. He said, “Browder. Bill Browder.” “Any relation?” I said. “Yes. Grandson.”
Bill Browder is the grandson of Earl Browder, the head of the Communist party — the CPUSA. He told me on that occasion, “My grandfather was the biggest Communist in America, and I was the biggest capitalist in Russia.” Bill Browder is the head of Hermitage Capital Management.
Sergei Magnitsky was his lawyer — the man who was tortured to death by the Russian authorities. You may have heard of the Magnitsky Act, in America: an act that places all the restrictions our country can impose, I gather, on the individuals who participated in Magnitsky’s murder. This has to do with visas, bank accounts, and that sort of thing.
That’s why Browder is here at the Freedom Forum: to tell the Magnitsky story, and to discuss the law.
First, he speaks a little about his background (his own background). Earl Browder was from Wichita, he says. I think, “Interesting — same as the Koch family.” Browder went to Moscow in 1927 and stayed several years. Married there. On home soil, he ran for president twice. The country preferred FDR.
When Bill Browder wanted to rebel against his family, what’d he do? “I put on a suit and tie, and I became a capitalist.”
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Moscow court rules prison official not guilty in Magnitsky’s death
Moscow City Court has upheld the acquittal of former deputy head of the Butyrka detention center Dmitry Kratov, who had been accused of negligence that led to the death of Sergey Magnitsky, a lawyer for Hermitage Capital.
The court has rejected an appeal filed by Magnitsky’s relatives, contesting Kratov’s acquittal, instead seconding the original verdict.
In late December, Moscow’s Tverskoy Court ruled that there was not enough evidence that Kratov was guilty of negligence. The ex-deputy head of the prison where Magnitsky died was the only official facing a trial in connection with the tragedy.
Kratov says he has not decided yet whether he will demand compensation for the criminal proceedings lodged against him, now deemed false. But Interfax reports it’s unlikely he will take it any further.
The lawyer representing Magnitsky’s family, Nikolay Gorokhov, said he will study the motivation behind the court’s ruling before making any decisions to appeal it.
Financial lawyer Sergey Magnitsky, 37, died in pre-trial detention in Moscow in November 2009.
He was working for the British investment fund Hermitage Capital, which became embroiled in a series of scandals between 2007-2009. Magnitsky accused a group of Russian officials of embezzlement. Soon afterwards he was arrested on charges of assisting Hermitage Capital to evade tax and was awaiting trial in Moscow’s Butyrka prison. He died in jail in 2009, about a year after his detention, of what doctors said was a heart attack. Magnitsky’s family demanded an investigation into his death.
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Bill Browder: I am Russia’s Biggest Enemy over Magnitsky Act
British hedge fund manager Bill Browder said he was now the Russian state’s single biggest enemy because of the Magnitsky Act, a US law approved last year to punish Russian officials thought to have been responsible for the death of lawyer Sergei Magnitsky.
Browder told the Oslo Freedom Forum that the act, which targets 18 named Russians subject to visa bans and asset freezes in the US, “really touches them” and that Russian president Vladimir Putin was “going completely out of his mind” over the repercussions.
In retaliation for the act, which it deemed “absurd’, Russia banned 18 Americans from entering the country.
Targeted sanctions and freezing of visa applications are “a new technology of fighting human rights abuse”, according to Browder, who is a British citizen but American by birth.
Founder of Hermitage Capital Management, Browder moved from the UK to Russia in 1996 to invest in newly privatised countries in Eastern Europe.
“My father was the biggest communist in America, so I said I’m gonna become the biggest capitalist in eastern Europe,” joked Browder. “How do you rebel against a family of communists? You put up a suit and become a capitalist.”
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CIA Spy Caught in Recruitment Sting, Russia Says
Russian operatives caught a CIA agent trying to recruit a member of the special services in Moscow with a promise to pay as much as $1 million a year for information, the Federal Security Service said.
The spy, identified as Ryan Christopher Fogle, worked undercover as the third secretary of the political section of the U.S. embassy, the FSB, as the main successor to the Soviet-era KGB is known in Russian, said on its website today.
The man the FSB identified as Fogle was detained last night in a sting operation that included video footage and photographs that were later distributed to media outlets and broadcast on state television. Fogle was returned to the embassy today, an on-duty FSB officer said by phone.
One photo shows the contents of the backpack the FSB said Fogle was carrying at the time of his arrest neatly arrayed on a table, including dark and light wigs, sunglasses, a compass, a map of Moscow, two knives, a notepad, a microphone, a plastic cigarette lighter and an RFID shield.
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One Man Against the Kremlin
William F. Browder has succeeded in making the Kremlin very angry, which is perhaps the best he could hope for after a remarkable three-year campaign to hold Russian government officials accountable for the wrongful death of Sergei L. Magnitsky, a 37-year-old lawyer, in a Moscow prison in 2009.
Luckily for Mr. Browder, when Russia’s leaders get really mad, they tend to spray the landscape with ammunition that often ends up hitting themselves in the feet, sometimes in the face.
From his London office, decorated with wall-to-wall framed newspaper articles about his case, Mr. Browder keeps turning each incoming attack into further proof that he is dealing with what he calls an evil, murderous, duplicitous and vengeful regime headed by President Vladimir V. Putin.
“What is the crux of the matter?” asked Mr. Browder, a U.S.-born British citizen, answering a question about the recent arrest warrant issued against him by a Moscow court.
“The crux is that in Russia, there is a kleptocracy run by Putin, and all the guys around him,” he said, warming to a familiar theme. “They’re not in their job for the execution of public service; their job is to steal money.”
On the face of it, the Browder vs. Russia match is uneven: One Man Against the Kremlin is almost a comic book title. In fact, it leveled out last December when the U.S. Congress, after heavy lobbying by Mr. Browder, adopted the so-called Magnitsky list, which imposes sanctions on 18 Russian officials alleged to have been complicit in the lawyer’s mistreatment. At that moment, Mr. Browder’s crusade turned into a major diplomatic onslaught, adding another issue to an already tense U.S.-Russia relationship.
Mr. Browder said that the Russian reaction, notably a ban on the adoption of Russian children by Americans, was aimed at Europe, where similar sanctions against Russian officials — visa bans and a freezing of assets — could hurt members of a governing elite who have chosen to shelter their assets, and in some cases their families, there.
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Reversal of fortune
William Browder, AB’85, was once the biggest capitalist in Russia. After his lawyer was tortured and died in jail, he became one of the Kremlin’s fiercest enemies.
It seems so long ago now, the moment he thought he’d escaped the worst. In 2007, almost two years after being stripped of his visa and expelled from Russia—his home and headquarters for nearly a decade, the place where he made an immense, improbable fortune—investment banker William Browder, AB’85, was on the phone with his lawyer, listening to him explain the huge fraud Browder had narrowly avoided. The scheme had been elaborate, involving a series of phony court filings secretly expropriating $1 billion from his firm, Hermitage Capital Management, to organized criminals and corrupt government officials.
But when the perpetrators arrived at the banks to claim the money they’d stolen, they found nothing there. The accounts were empty. Wary after his expulsion, Browder had quietly withdrawn everything. Weeks after the failed theft, his lawyer pieced together what had happened. “And I began to laugh sort of nervously, but happily,” Browder recalls, “because we had successfully avoided this them grabbing our assets.” His lawyer, a 36-year-old Russian named Sergei Magnitsky, didn’t laugh.
Instead he warned Browder, “Russian stories never end this way.”
For Magnitsky, the story ended in death. Looking deeper into the attempted theft, he uncovered another crime, a $230 million tax fraud linked to the same shell companies and the same criminals and corrupt officials who’d tried to defraud Browder’s firm. When Magnitsky reported what he’d found to the authorities, he was arrested and accused of the crime himself. He died almost 12 months later in a Russian jail cell, sick and thin and bruised. Investigators later concluded that he was tortured.
For Browder, anguished and transformed by Magnitsky’s death, the story isn’t over. Once the largest foreign portfolio investor in Russia, whose conduct typified to some the recklessness and rapacity of post-Soviet capitalism, Browder has become a crusader for human rights. Once among Vladimir Putin’s most vociferous cheerleaders, firm in his belief—despite others’ skepticism, and despite Putin’s own encroachments on business and civil liberties—that the Russian president was acting in the best interests of his people, Browder has now become a vehement enemy of the Russian state.
Mostly, he’s earned Russia’s ire by telling Magnitsky’s story to anyone who will listen. For three years Browder has lobbied Western governments to enact sanctions against the Russian officials involved in Magnitsky’s detention, brutal treatment, and death—laws “naming names, banning visas, and freezing accounts,” as he puts it. His relentlessness led to the Magnitsky Act, signed into US law last December, which prevents complicit Russian officials from visiting the United States or investing money, depositing assets, and owning property here. It also freezes their current assets. Vigorously opposed by the Kremlin, the Magnitsky Act has soured US relations with Moscow and earned Browder a fresh round of death threats and reprisals from the country where he once lived.
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Russia: Kerry’s Chilly Kremlin Reception
This past Tuesday, U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry met President Vladimir Putin of Russia in the Kremlin.
Kerry was seeking to repair frayed ties with Russia and obtain Moscow’s assistance with a settlement in Syria. The U.S. and its allies hope to put an end to the civil war, and the Obama Administration wants Russia to help.
Yet Putin gave Kerry the cold shoulder, and Russia’s help in Syria is unlikely. Russia does not want the West and its Gulf allies to topple the Assad regime. Putin believes Russia got a black eye when it abstained in the United Nations Security Council vote that toppled Muammar Qadhafi. However, Kerry agreed to a peace conference on Syria, which will take place in Geneva—with no preconditions, such as Assad’s departure.
This conference is an achievement for Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov, who will have a photo-op with Kerry; an achievement for Russia, which will appear as Washington’s equal in the international arena; and an achievement for Kerry, who will boast that he got the parties around the table.
The Obama Administration recognizes that there are problems with its Syria policy, where it finds itself stuck between the repressive Assad regime and Sunni extremists, including al-Qaeda-affiliated Jabha al-Nusrah. However, by agreeing to a Geneva conference with Russian co-sponsorship, Obama gained nothing while providing Moscow with a diplomatic advantage.
Kerry’s meeting with Putin was nightmarish. He was kept waiting for three hours for the master of the Kremlin, contrary to diplomatic protocol. Putin then appeared disinterested, fidgeting with his pen throughout the meeting.
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To learn more about what happened to Sergei Magnitsky please read below
- Sergei Magnitsky
- Why was Sergei Magnitsky arrested?
- Sergei Magnitsky’s torture and death in prison
- President’s investigation sabotaged and going nowhere
- The corrupt officers attempt to arrest 8 lawyers
- Past crimes committed by the same corrupt officers
- Petitions requesting a real investigation into Magnitsky's death
- Worldwide reaction, calls to punish those responsible for corruption and murder
- Complaints against Lt.Col. Kuznetsov
- Complaints against Major Karpov
- Cover up
- Press about Magnitsky
- Bloggers about Magnitsky
- Corrupt officers:
- Sign petition
- Citizen investigator
- Join Justice for Magnitsky group on Facebook
- Contact us
- Sergei Magnitsky
