Posts Tagged ‘ponomaryov’
U.S. Magnitsky law will be beneficial – rights activist Ponomaryov
Veteran of the Russian human rights movement and For Human Rights group leader Lev Ponomaryov has welcomed the decision by the United States House of Representatives to approve the Magnitsky bill, which could impose visa and financial sanctions against Russian officials.
“It is a concrete signal and I think it will be of benefit to Russia,” Ponomaryov told Interfax on Thursday.
There was no genuine inquiry into the death of Hermitage Capital lawyer Sergei Magnitsky, and the Russian officials and law enforcers responsible for his death have not been punished, he said.
“The Russian public demanded an answer from the authorities. No one answered to us. On the other hand, all the circumstances surrounding Magnitsky’s death indicate that he was killed. Just as during the Soviet period, there is some impulse coming from the West,” Ponomaryov said.
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Aleksanyan’s Death ‘Practically Murder’
Human rights activists said former Yukos vice president Vasily Aleksanyan, who died this week of AIDS-related illnesses, would have lived longer if the authorities had not kept him in prison for nearly three years on politically tainted charges.
Aleksanyan, who fought a protracted legal battle with the authorities before finally being freed on bail in 2009 to seek medical treatment, died at home Monday at the age of 39.
“It was practically a murder,” rights champion Valery Borshchyov told Business FM radio on Tuesday. “He could have lived longer if he had not been kept in detention.”
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Rights activists skeptical about Interior Ministry reshuffles
Interfax
Leading Russian human rights activists believe the recent reshuffles in the leadership of the Interior Ministry announced by President Dmitry Medvedev are not a sign of a thorough reform of the Russian law enforcement institutions.
“This looks more like an outbreak of some intra-clan rivalry rather than a real reform of the Interior Ministry,” Lev Ponomaryov, the leader of the organization For Human Rights, told Interfax on Saturday in commenting on the reshuffles.
“I am sure that a real reform should begin with the interior minister,” Ponomaryov said.
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Crime and unjust punishment in Russia
The Lancet
Tom Parfitt
A year after the controversial death in a Moscow detention centre of Sergei Magnitsky—a 37-year-old lawyer who was denied vital medical treatment—Russia is promising an overhaul of its antiquated prison system. But will the reforms bring real change to health-care provision?
It was 1830 h on November 16, 2009, when Sergei Magnitsky was transferred to the Matrosskaya Tishina detention centre in Moscow. The 37-year-old lawyer had been healthy when he was arrested a year earlier on fraud charges that colleagues said were trumped-up in revenge for his work for Hermitage, an international investment fund that passed evidence about corrupt officials to Russian media. Yet within 4 hours of arriving at Matrosskaya Tishina (Sailors’ Rest), Magnitsky was dead.
In the past year the Magnitsky Affair, as it is known in Russia, has become emblematic of the country’s woeful human rights record and its—sometimes wilful—neglect of the sick in prison. 6 weeks after Magnitsky was found lifeless in his cell, the public oversight commission (ONK) for Moscow’s pretrial detention centres published a scathing report describing the events that led up to his death.
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