Posts Tagged ‘cameron’

09
September 2013

Andy McSmith’s Diary: How Tory right wing makes Britain an unlikely bedfellow of Putin’s party

The Independent

David Cameron heads off to Russia on Thursday for the G20 summit of world leaders, promising that he is not going to shy away from tackling Vladimir Putin, pictured, about a couple of very serious differences between Russia’s regime and ours.

While Syria is the bigger and more urgent, the Foreign Office has said that the Prime Minister will also raise the question of the law that the Russian parliament passed in June, banning the “promotion of non-traditional sexual relations”.

What with that and the suspicious deaths of the Russian lawyer, Sergei Magnitsky, and the defector, Alexander Litvinenko, you might think that the British Conservatives are not exactly soulmates with Putin’s United Russia party.

But here is a strange thing: whenever the parliamentarians who make up the Council or Europe meet, almost all the leading European centre-right parties – including Germany’s Christian Democrats, whose leader is Angela Merkel, and France’s Union pour un Mouvement Populaire, founded in 2002 by Jacques Chirac – go into one room, while the Tories walk wistfully by and into another room, to commune with the delegates from United Russia.

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23
November 2012

Moscow-on-Thames

Foreign Policy

When most people think of British-Russian relations, they imagine Bond films, iron curtains, Cambridge double agents, irradiated dissidents, and billionaire oligarchs who dress like Evelyn Waugh but behave like Tony Soprano and then sue each other in London courts. But there’s another element underwriting this not-so-special relationship.

British elites, elected or otherwise, have grown highly susceptible to the unscrutinized rubles that continue to pour into the boom-or-boom London real estate market and a luxury-service industry catering to wealthy Russians who are as bodyguarded as they are jet-set. This phenomenon has not only imported some of the worst practices of a mafia state across the English Channel, but it has had a deleterious impact on Britain’s domestic politics. And some of the most powerful and well-connected figures of British public life, from the Rothschilds to former prime ministers, have been taken in by it. Most surprising, though, is how the heirs to Margaret Thatcher’s fierce opposition to the Soviets have often been the ones most easily seduced by the Kremlin’s entreaties.

On Aug. 21, a new lobby group called Conservative Friends of Russia (CFoR) was launched at the London home of Alexander Yakovenko, the Russian ambassador to Britain. The launch was attended by some 250 guests, including parliamentarians, Conservative Party members, businessmen, lobbyists, NGO representatives, and even princes. Yakovenko and Member of Parliament John Whittingdale, who chairs the Culture Select Committee in Parliament and is an “honorary vice president” of CFoR, both delivered keynote addresses. The lavish do in the backyard of the Kremlin envoy featured, as the Guardian reported, a “barbecue, drinks and a raffle, with prizes of vodka, champagne and a biography of Vladimir Putin,” and it came just days after the Pussy Riot verdict. It was an open invitation to controversy. If CFoR wanted to portray itself as merely a promoter of “dialogue” between Britain and Russia, it was an odd beginning for a group born looking and sounding a lot like “Tories for Putin.”

CFoR was founded by Richard Royal, a public affairs manager at Ladbrokes, a popular chain of betting parlors in Britain. He also owns his own company, Lionheart Public Affairs, which has no website but shares a registered address with the new pro-Russia lobby group. Responding to the storm of criticism his new project has provoked, Royal took to the Guardian’s website to defend the initiative against what he called “armchair critics on Twitter,” in language you’d expect from a PR professional. “Whether we like it or not,” Royal wrote, “Russia is an influential and essential part of the international community and its importance will only grow over time. We need to stop making decisions based on misconceptions that are decades old, and deal with reality.”

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03
September 2012

Russia says it will respond tit-for-tat to any British sanctions over lawyer’s prison death

Washington Post

Russia sternly warned Britain on Monday that it will respond tit-for-tat if London imposes any travel restrictions that would target Russian officials allegedly involved in the prison death of a Russian lawyer.

Russian Foreign Ministry spokesman Alexander Lukashevich said that Moscow asked London about a Sunday Times report claiming that British authorities had compiled a list of 60 Russian officials who could be denied entry over their alleged involvement in Sergei Magnitsky’s death in November 2009.

“Obviously if London introduces any sanctions against Russian citizens Russia will respond appropriately in line with diplomatic practice,” Lukashevich said.

Magnitsky died in custody of untreated pancreatitis after being arrested by the same Russian government officials he had accused of corruption.

His case further tarnished Russia’s rights record and prompted the U.S. House of Representatives to pass a bill in June targeting Russian officials involved in the case. The Kremlin has responded angrily to the American action and threatened to take countermeasures.

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29
May 2012

From jail cell, Mikhail Khodorkovsky urges Britain to ban senior Russian officials from Olympics

Daily Telegraph

Mikhail Khodorkovsky, the jailed oil tycoon, has called on Britain to prevent Russian ofrficials suspected of human rights abuses or corruption from attending the Olympics.

In a letter passed to The Sunday Telegraph from his prison cell, Mr Khodorkovsky urged a ban on 308 officials including high-profile figures such as Russian deputy prime minister Vladislav Surkov, youth leader Vasily Yakemenko and controversial elections chief Vladimir Churov.

The provocative proposal comes as William Hague, the Foreign Secretary, travels to Moscow for a one day visit tomorrow.

He is expected to broach democracy issues briefly but the main focus of the trip will be multilateral cooperation over Syria and Iran.

Mr Khodorkovsky, jailed on allegedly trumped up charges of fraud in 2003, stopped short of requesting an entry ban on Vladimir Putin, but urged Prime Minister David Cameron to press the Russian president on his autocratic leadership if he travels to London for the Games.

“If he is willing, there is much that Putin can do to push Russian society down the road to democracy and reform,” said Mr Khodorkovsky, 48, who is behind bars at a penal colony in Karelia region in northwest Russia. “But surrounding himself by ‘yes men’, he will not often hear the case for change. It is the role of other world leaders to spell out the price Russia tragically pays for being semi-detached from the family of modern democratic nations.”

The tycoon said western countries had “much to gain” if they helped transform Russia from a country where “the state expropriates assets and where the rule of law has been corrupted” into a stable democracy with a diverse economy.

“I would strongly urge Mr Cameron to speak the truth to Mr Putin, that Russia cannot survive on fossil fuels alone and that the days of being able to maintain a ‘managed democracy’ are numbered,” he said.
Mr Putin was elected for a third term as president in March after a series of mass street protests against his rule, and announced a new government dominated by loyal hardliners last week.

Mr Khodorkovsky, who was once Russia’s richest man and owner of the Yukos oil giant, was prosecuted after coming in to conflict with Mr Putin in the early 2000s, when the latter was serving his first term in the Kremlin. The businessman was handed a new sentence in a second fraud trial in 2010 which will keep him in jail until 2017.

Mr Putin is widely thought to have initiated the legal charge on Mr Khodorkovsky in retaliation against him sponsoring opposition parties, while the Russian leader’s supporters say the businessman is a thief who deserved all he got.

In the letter passed to The Sunday Telegraph via his lawyers, Mr Khodorkovsky said Mr Putin needed to be taught a lesson: “I understand it would be very difficult for the British government to ban any head of state from the Olympics, especially from a member-state of the G8 and Council of Europe.

“I also, however, understand that the values of the Olympics are about respect, excellence and friendship and it would do Putin no harm to be exposed to these ideals and think of applying them at home.”

Mr Khodorkvosky said there was “something that the British government can do to raise the profile of human rights whilst playing host to the Olympic Games”. He referred to a list of Russian officials allegedly involved in human rights violations which was presented to the US Congress last year by the opposition leader and former world chess champion, Garry Kasparov.

“I would call on the UK public to look closely at Kasparov’s list when checking against the Russian delegation visiting for London 2012,” said Mr Khodorkovsky.

The suggested visa-ban list, available online, includes Mr Surkov, the former Kremlin “grey cardinal”, Mr Yakemenko, who was once head of the rampantly nationalist Nashi youth group, Mr Churov, who is detested by liberals for his alleged role in election fraud, and Yury Chaika, Russia’s tough prosecutor general.

It also features hundreds of prosecutors, policemen and state employees allegedly involved in the persecution of Yukos employees.

It is unclear how many of the people on the list intend to visit London for the Olympics. Mr Yakemenko’s federal agency on youth affairs, RosMolodezh, is subordinated to the ministry of sport and he is known to be a table tennis fan. No one was available for comment at the agency on Friday.

Moscow is already seething at US and EU proposals to introduce a “Magnitsky list”, featuring people allegedly involved in the death in custody of 37-year-old lawyer Sergei Magnitsky in 2009.

The US is said to have quietly introduced a ban on 60 Russian officials suspected of involvement in his death in July last year, and the UK reportedly followed suit in April. US senators want more stringent measures to freeze the officials’ assets.

The UK has been trying to patch up relations with Moscow after a sharp dip following the death in London in 2006 of former KGB colonel Alexander Litvinenko. Mr Cameron met Mr Putin and then-President Dmitry Medvedev on a visit to Moscow last September and said the Litvinenko affair should not “freeze the entire relationship”.

A British government official said on Friday that Russia remained a “crucial partner” for the UK and that Mr Cameron’s visit last year had “set the tone for a relationship on a stronger footing”.
He said the principle areas of discussion during Mr Hague’s visit to Moscow tomorrow would be multilateral issues such as Iran, Syria and the Middle East peace process.

However, the Foreign Secretary is also expected to address the ongoing stalemate over Litvinenko’s alleged murder. Russia has refused to extradite the chief suspect, Andrei Lugovoi, to the UK. A lack of prosecutions in the Magnitsky case may also be raised.

Mr Khodorkovsky said in his letter that he did not expect to be released early from prison under Russia’s current leadership. He kept up his spirits by corresponding with intellectuals like popular Russian novelist and opposition figure Boris Akunin, and by anticipating time with his family when he is finally freed, he said.

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25
January 2012

Cameron Council of Europe Visit a Waste of Air Miles

Progress Online

The Prime Minister’s flying visit to the Council of Europe’s Parliamentary Assembly today is mission undeliverable, even if many may feel Cameron has a good case. But the way he has pandered to the worst atavistic elements of the Europhobe right and the clamour of the off-shore press for retributionist punishment of prisoners means he will hardly get a hearing.

A simple solution to the issue of prisoners voting rights, for example, would be to do what the French do which is to empower judges to add an additional sentence of loss of civic rights for those imprisoned for serious crimes. This is in conformity with ECHR judgements. Switzerland, the dream nation for anti-EU Tories, has allowed its prisoners to vote for 40 years as have all the more civilised European nations.

Britain has eight, just 8, cases before the ECHR but the real problem is the 100,000 plus cases from Russia. One answer may be to suspend Russia as it was clearly an error to let Russia join the Council of Europe in 1996 when the country had made no effort and still makes no effort to introduce rule of law. The death of Sergei Magnitksy, lawyer of a British firm, in gruesome circumstances in a Russian prison highlights the contempt Russia’s kleptocratic rulers have for legal norms.

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04
October 2011

Britain ‘Blacklists’ Magnitsky Officials

The Moscow Times

Britain has secretly blacklisted at least 60 Russian officials implicated in the 2009 prison death of lawyer Sergei Magnitsky, a British media report said Sunday.

The move would replicate a measure taken by the United States in July that prompted the Russian Foreign Ministry to draw up a blacklist of U.S. officials in retaliation.

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03
October 2011

Secret visa bans over death of Russian whistleblower Sergei Magnitsky

The Observer

Up to 60 Russian officials implicated in the controversial death of a whistleblower have been secretly banned from entering the UK by the British government.

Lawyer Sergei Magnitsky was working for Hermitage Capital Management, a British-based investment fund, when he exposed a tax fraud worth pounds 144m, the biggest in Russian history.

After making accusations against Interior Ministry officials, he was arrested and then died in police custody after being denied medical care. Human rights activists say that the father-of-two was tortured and badly beaten in the hours before his death in November 2009. John McCain, the former US presidential candidate, and others have called for sanctions against Russian officials implicated in Magnitsky’s death.

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22
September 2011

Cameron, You Dropped the Ball

The Moscow Times

Dear Prime Minister Cameron,

During your recent visit to Moscow you claimed that you would like to take on the skeptics of the Russian-British relationship. I would like to accept that challenge.

In your speech at Moscow State University on Sept. 12, you outlined two types of skeptics — those who believe Britain is untrustworthy and for whom the relationship is connected to the Soviet past, and those, you said, who believe that Russia should not modernize, innovate and open up.

Taking your second set of skeptics first, I can think of almost no one who believes that Russia should not modernize, innovate or open up. Where did you get that from? You would have to be reliving the Cold War to believe that Russia should be deliberately kept down in any way. All reasonable people want a modern Russia, even if we only define modernization narrowly, as the Kremlin has done, as scientific-technical modernization.

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15
September 2011

Cameron justifies Moscow visit to parliament

RIA Novosti

British Prime Minister David Cameron told parliament on Wednesday that he had raised a number of human-rights issues with the Russian authorities during his recent visit to Moscow.

Cameron met with President Dmitry Medvedev and Prime Minster Vladimir Putin during his brief visit to the Russian capital. He also met a number of human-rights activists.

He was accused during a news conference with Medvedev of “parking” the issue of Alexander Litvinenko, the former KGB officer killed in London in 2006, in exchange for trade relations. Cameron denied the allegation, saying the issue remained “important” for Britain.

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