Posts Tagged ‘moscow news’

23
May 2012

Civil society surges ahead of the authorities

Moscow News

Russia’s civil society has made a dramatic leap forward over the past three years and is doing much more to curb corruption than the authorities, Yelena Panfilova, a prominent, outgoing member of the presidential anti-corruption and human rights council, said on Wednesday.

“Russia today is not the same country it was when I joined the council three years ago; first of all, it’s about the society, not the authorities,” Panfilova, who heads Transparency International’s Russian branch, said at a news conference in Moscow marking the end of the council’s term under President Dmitry Medvedev.

Panfilova announced last week that she was not planning to continue her work with the council, which is expected to be reshuffled following the inauguration of Vladimir Putin on May 7. Several other council members also said they were going to resign.

Some observers have suggested it was their unwillingness to compromise with former KGB agent Putin that forced them to leave the council. But Panfilova downplayed the allegation on Wednesday, saying her departure was due to her desire to focus on civil activism rather than a falling out with the authorities.

Council members admitted that their success in promoting human rights and the rule of law in Russia was limited.

“We have done a small part of what we were planning to do,” Lyudmila Alexeyeva, who heads the Moscow Helsinki Group, said.

’No disappointment’

Yet, when asked by a Western reporter whether they were disappointed with a lack of progress in their work, council members said they were rather realistic and did not expect things to improve by leaps and bounds.

“To be disappointed, one must first be charmed,” Panfilova quipped, adding that this was not the case with her, since she realized that Russia still has a long way to go before its citizens can enjoy full human rights and social justice.

She admitted, however, that she was “embarrassed” with the strong opposition that many of the council’s initiatives faced from local officials who were reluctant to sacrifice their power in favor of a more open and just society.

Unresolved cases

Among the goals to be pursued by the newly formed council, Fedotov and his colleagues named the tightening of punishment for abuse of media freedom, the creation of public television, as well as better anti-corruption controls.

It is yet unclear how many of the council’s current initiatives will survive Putin’s return to the Kremlin. The issues in question include the high-profile cases of jailed ex-Yukos head Mikhail Khodorkovsky and anti-corruption lawyer Sergei Magnitsky, whose death in a Moscow pre-trial detention in November 2009 triggered international outcry.

“We couldn’t resolve the main problems with the Khodorkovsky and Magnitsky cases,” Mara Polyakova, a council member overseeing reforms in the legal and law enforcement systems, admitted.

Nevertheless, she said she believed the council’s campaign to highlight the Khodorkovsky case had a “major effect on our citizens.”

Khodorkovsky and his business partner Platon Lebedev were detained in 2003 on fraud charges and subsequently jailed for eight years. They had been due for release in 2011, but were found guilty on a second set of charges and their sentences extended until 2018 in a highly controversial trial in December 2010.

In early February, the council urged Medvedev to pardon Khodorkovsky along with 30 other prisoners. But Medvedev refused, saying he did not understand why he should pardon someone who had not asked for clemency.

Hermitage Capital lawyer Magnitsky’s death at Moscow’s infamous Matrosskaya Tishina pretrial detention center came to Medvedev’s attention last year, after the presidential council issued a report saying that his arrest was unlawful, his detention marked by beatings and torture aimed at extracting a confession of guilt, and that prison officials instructed doctors not to treat him. Two doctors have been charged with negligence in connection with the case, but charges were subsequently dropped against one of them.

Magnitsky was arrested in November 2008 on tax evasion charges by those same officers he had shortly before accused of stealing $230 million from the state budget.

New council ‘up to Putin’

Fedotov said it was up to Putin to ensure that the council does not “turn into window dressing.”

Fedotov said he would welcome any newcomers in the council if they share the same values as those whom they would replace.

“But if in the place of those great people we will have people who attack human rights rather than protect them… I will not be there,” he said. онлайн займы hairy girl https://zp-pdl.com/online-payday-loans-cash-advances.php https://zp-pdl.com/best-payday-loans.php payday loan

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19
March 2012

Russia-US stand apart over Magnitsky bill

Moscow News

The US senate is considering a resounding rap on the knuckles to Russia, in a bill that went before Congress on Thursday, lambasting the rule of law in Russia and condemning a raft of officials whom supporters of dead lawyer Sergei Magnitsky accuse of corruption and complicity in his death.

A bipartisan bill sponsored by 15 senators proposes to again freeze the assets and block visas of individuals who Washington sees as committing gross human rights violations against Russian human rights activists.

The Russian foreign ministry said the bill was “regrettable,” RIA Novosti reported.

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16
August 2011

Persecution beyond the grave

The Moscow News

One of the bizarre anomalies of the Russian legal system is the possibility to prosecute, charge and sentence people who are already dead.

First we had the grotesque spectacle of lawyer Sergei Magnitsky being investigated for tax fraud 18 months after his death.

Now have an even more obscene case.

Olga Alexandrina, a 36-year-old pediatrician who died with her mother, also a doctor, last year when the small Citroen they were traveling in on Moscow’s Leninsky Prospekt was in a head-on collision with a chauffer-driven Mercedes carrying Lukoil vice-president Anatoly Barkov. (Some witnesses said that Barkov’s Mercedes swerved into oncoming traffic in an attempt to overtake, but Barkov’s driver, Vladimir Kartayev, denied this.)

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19
July 2011

Accused doctors are ‘scapegoats’, Magnitsky’s boss claims

The Moscow News

As the Russian media reported criminal charges against two prison doctors supposedly responsible for Sergei Magnitsky’s death, his old boss is not wholly convinced.

“While I’m sure these doctors were sadistic sociopaths for what they did to Sergei, I’m sure they were taking orders from investigators higher up,” Bill Browder told The Moscow News, minutes after a Moscow court turned down a request from Natalia Magnitskaya, the dead man’s mother, to get tissue samples for independent examination.

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04
July 2011

Dutch MPs impose sanctions on under-fire officials, but Moscow bids to arrest dead lawyer’s colleague

Moscow News

Europe’s relations with Russia have been handed another test, as Dutch lawmakers voted unanimously to slap sanctions on Russian officials on the ever more notorious Magnitsky list.

In The Hague, 150 Dutch MPs voted in favor of sanctions against 60 officials implicated in the prosecution and death in disputed circumstances of Sergei Magnitsky.

Magnitsky was a lawyer with British hedge fund Hermitage Capital and claimed to have exposed how Russian officials had embezzled $230 million of public funds.

But on the same day that Magnistky supporters were clapping themselves on the back a Moscow court issued an arrest warrant for Ivan Cherkasov, Magnitsky’s old colleague.

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10
June 2011

Surkov, McFaul talk corruption

The Moscow News

First Deputy Head of the Presidential Administration, Vladislav Surkov, traveled to Washington D.C. to discuss child protection, migration and anti-corruption and prison reform efforts as part of the U.S. – Russia Bilateral Presidential Commission Civil Society Working Group – while discussion of the ongoing controversy over the death of Sergei Magnitsky was apparently left off the table.

The Russian delegation, comrpised of officials and human rights activists, arrived in Washington on Tuesday, June 6. The participants were divided into subgroups, each of which dealt with one specific issue. “Some visited prisons, some focused on child abuse,” said Yana Yakovleva, a representative of Business-Solidarnost, a participating community organization aimed at protecting entrepreneurs. “Basically, it was a sharing experience and an exchange of views.”

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03
June 2011

A ghost at the banquet

The Moscow News

The general mood at VTB Capital’s “Russia Calling” forum in London was one of cautious optimism about changes under way in reforming the economy, but there was one harsh reminder of the huge mountain to climb in improving the business climate.

Former Yevroset boss Yevgeny Chichvarkin, like Banquo’s ghost at the feast in “Macbeth”, turned up outside the forum to protest that Russia is still not calling him back, despite criminal charges being dropped against him by prosecutors.

Most investors inside the forum were at pains to stress that cases such as that of Chichvarkin and Sergei Magnitsky, the hedge fund lawyer whose died in jail after his company was embroiled in a bitter dispute with law enforcement officers , are still relatively isolated, and that most foreign investors in Russia make a lot of money out of the country.

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30
May 2011

Dead lawyer’s supporters fume after Silchenko is exonerated by prosecutors

The Moscow News

Oleg Silchenko, the man who activists and western politicians accuse of bringing about Sergei Magnitsky’s death, has been cleared by the Prosecutor General’s office.

Vladimir Markin, Investigative Committee spokesman, said Lt.Col. Silchenko had not violated any federal laws in “pressing criminal charges and arresting” Magtnitsky, or in extending his custody as trial approached, RIA Novosti reported.

Magnistky died in detention awaiting trial for the same embezzlement charges he was accusing government officials of. He died aged 37 after being denied medical treatment for pancreatitis.

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20
May 2011

Russia-US stand apart over Magnitsky bill

The Moscow News

The US senate is considering a resounding rap on the knuckles to Russia, in a bill that went before Congress on Thursday, lambasting the rule of law in Russia and condemning a raft of officials whom supporters of dead lawyer Sergei Magnitsky accuse of corruption and complicity in his death.

A bipartisan bill sponsored by 15 senators proposes to again freeze the assets and block visas of individuals who Washington sees as committing gross human rights violations against Russian human rights activists.

The Russian foreign ministry said the bill was “regrettable,” RIA Novosti reported.

Read More →

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