Posts Tagged ‘kathy lally’
Fair Trials International group urges reforms for Interpol arrests
The case of a Russian environmental activist who fled the country but was later arrested, despite finding sanctuary in Finland, reveals how political motives can sometimes improperly influence international police work, a London-based group said this week.
The international police network in question is Interpol, which represents 190 member countries, including the United States, allowing them to issue international warrants or request information about suspects facing criminal charges at home.
Fair Trials International, an advocacy group for those arrested abroad, issued a report early Thursday asserting that the agency is used by some of its members — including Russia, Belarus, Turkey, Iran and Venezuela — to pursue political ends.
Pyotr Silaev, a 28-year-old Russian who took part in a protest in Moscow in July 2010 against the destruction of a forest in the suburb of Khimki, illustrates how Interpol can be wrongly used, according to Robert Jackman, a Fair Trials spokesman.
When police began arresting some of the demonstrators and accused Silaev of hooliganism, he fled to Finland, which accepted him as a political refugee.
Later, Silaev traveled to Spain and was arrested there on a Russian request issued through Interpol. He spent eight days in prison and six months stuck in Spain while fighting extradition to Russia. A Spanish court eventually refused to extradite him, ruling that his arrest was politically motivated. Fair Trials is trying to get his name stricken from the Interpol database.
When Moscow police wanted Interpol help to arrest William Browder, the investment banker who campaigned for the United States to punish Russia for human rights abuses, Browder quickly found a way to give the international agency his side of the story.
Interpol promptly declared the request to locate Browder — who fought for passage of the U.S. Magnitsky Act — politically motivated and deleted the entry from its database. Browder’s situation showed that individuals are shielded from abuse by Interpol, according to Ronald K. Noble, the agency’s head.
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Trials suggest a growing repression in Russia
Last week was a busy one for Russian authorities, who arrested the only nationally known opposition mayor for bribery, sought six years in prison for crusading blogger Alexei Navalny and asked a court to declare a long-dead lawyer guilty of tax evasion.
The trial of a dozen demonstrators accused of rioting and attacking police at Bolotnaya Square in Moscow on the eve of President Vladimir Putin’s inauguration ground on. Maria Alyokhina, a punk rocker sent to a labor camp for two years for a singing protest in Moscow’s main cathedral, lost an appeal. An appeal filed on behalf of the oil tycoon Mikhail Khodorkovsky, who has been in prison for nearly 10 years, was rejected.
Leonid Razvozzhayev, an opposition organizer who was kidnapped and returned to Moscow after he sought asylum in Ukraine, was given permission to get married in jail — perhaps because he is not expected to get out soon. He faces 10 years in prison if convicted of planning riots.
And Putin signed not one, but two laws aimed at gays.
By week’s end, it was clear to anyone who held out hope to the contrary that the future here looks more and more repressive. The authorities appeared intent on using all their resources — police, courts, legislature and media — to pursue that end and silence dissent for years to come.
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Europe may follow U.S. on Magnitsky sanctions
A report prepared on the death of Russian whistle-blowing lawyer Sergei Magnitsky, presented Tuesday to a European body that promotes human rights, severely criticized Russia for failing to hold anyone accountable for his death in pretrial detention.
The report was prepared by Andreas Gross, a member of the Swiss parliament, for the 47 countries making up the Council of Europe and was given to the council’s human rights and legal affairs committee Tuesday. At a news conference in France, Gross said the report would provide material for the council’s Parliamentary Assembly to consider when it debates possible sanctions against Russia at its winter session.
Magnitsky, who died in Moscow in November 2009, accused Russian officials of using documents stolen from the Hermitage Capital investment fund to carry off a $230 million tax fraud. Instead of pursuing the officials, authorities charged Magnitsky with the fraud. Recently, Russia opened a new case against him — in death — and brought charges against Hermitage founder William Browder as well.
Gross, who interviewed numerous witnesses in Russia, told the news conference that high-level officials declined to talk to him. He said the evidence he accumulated, however, persuaded him that Magnitsky was innocent and responsibility lay with “a group of criminals, including the persons he had accused before these persons took him into custody, where he died.”
The report comes six months after the United States passed the Magnitsky law, which places financial and visa sanctions on certain Russian officials. Russia vehemently denounced the U.S. law, and on Tuesday Ilyas Umakhanov, the deputy speaker of Russia’s upper house of parliament, criticized the Gross report. He called it full of “flaws, contradictions and myths.”
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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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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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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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U.S., Russia try to reset and retrench relations, but Magnitsky bill threatens process
The visit of a multimillionaire Russian senator to the United States last week was difficult, upbeat and contradictory — the very image of the reset-retrench relationship between the two countries.
Vitaly Malkin was in Washington to confront Congress over the Magnitsky bill, which would put Russians connected with human rights abuses on a blacklist, denying them U.S. visas and freezing their assets.
The bill has infuriated Russian officials, and they speak about it often and with vehemence. “We really don’t want the U.S. Congress to adopt this bill, which has the potential to deteriorate U.S.-Russia relations for years, or even for decades, to come,” Malkin said at a news conference last Wednesday.
But the day before found him at the Open World office at the Library of Congress, posing for a friendly photo with James H. Billington, the librarian of Congress, and discussing his commitment of more than $1 million to the U.S. government-run Open World program. Malkin’s money helps send prospective leaders from his constituency on exchanges to the United States to learn about good governance, rule of law and other highlights of democracy.
While Malkin and three colleagues from the upper house of parliament were in the United States, Russia’s lower house was adopting a law requiring non-governmental organizations that accept foreign money and engage in election monitoring, human rights advocacy and corruption fighting to declare themselves as foreign agents.
Russian activists say the foreign agent law, which the upper house, the Federation Council, is expected to rubber-stamp this week, was pushed along in retaliation for the Magnitsky bill.
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International group urges sanctions on Russians
An international body devoted to security and democracy Sunday chided Russia—one of its 56 members—on its human rights record and urged governments to impose sanctions by banning visas and freezing the assets of Russians connected to the death of a crusading lawyer named Sergei Magnitsky.
Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), representing the United States at the Parliamentary Assembly of the Organization for Cooperation and Security in Europe, which was convened in Monaco, spoke urgently in favor of the resolution approved Sunday, calling Magnitsky’s death an example of pervasive and systemic corruption in Russia.
A similar law, named in memory of Magnitsky, is already making its way through Congress, with the energetic support of Sen. Benjamin L. Cardin (D.-Md.), who is vice president of the OSCE parliamentary assembly.
Magnitsky was working for an American law firm in Moscow, advising the Hermitage Capital investment firm on tax issues, when he uncovered a $230 million tax fraud. After he accused tax officials and police investigators of the crime, Magnitsky was arrested and charged instead. He died in 2009 after a year in pre-trial detention, denied medical care and showing signs of having been beaten. “Not one person has been held responsible,” McCain said, calling Magnitsky’s treatment tantamount to torture.
Russia put up a spirited defense Sunday, arguing that an investigation of Magnitsky’s death was very much underway and that the sanctions amounted to conviction by public opinion rather than a court of law. It was overruled by an overwhelming show of hands in favor of the resolution.
Speaker after speaker criticized official impunity, the lack of a convincing investigation and the absence of punishment for Magnitsky’s death. He was 37 when he died.
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Magnitsky documentary suggests fraud, collusion between Russian officials, police detectives
By Kathy Lally and Will Englund
MOSCOW — Shortly before the Russian government was defrauded of $230 million in 2007, the officials who approved the whopping tax refund at the heart of the scheme traveled to a sunny Mediterranean resort with the police who would later investigate the theft.
This wasn’t their first trip abroad together, nor was it the first or last scheme that would be traced back to the same set of tax officials and police, along with a banker who handled the proceeds of the thefts. Their relationship, newly revealed in travel records provided to The Washington Post, illustrates a level of collusion at the heart of the Russian government that allows corruption to flourish despite repeated official promises to vanquish it.
The 2007 case, unveiled by a Russian lawyer named Sergei Magnitsky, has become widely known. Magnitsky’s death in custody in 2009 has prompted the U.S. Congress to take up a bill named in his honor that would impose sanctions on Russian officials connected to his death, freezing their assets and prohibiting visas.
Russian authorities have said the tax officials were tricked into approving a fraudulent return. The prospect of U.S. sanctions has infuriated the Russian government, which has vowed to retaliate if the law is passed.
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