"Magnitsky List" - bloodlines

On April 4, US Congressman Jim McGovern submitted to the White House a list of 282 names of Russian officials who should be included in the "Magnitsky list." On April 13, the final list will be presented by the State Department.

This story began in April 2010. Then Benjamin Cardin, a Democratic senator from the state of Maryland, compiled a list of 60 names of Russian officials whom he considered involved in the criminal prosecution and death in the pre-trial detention center of Sergei Magnitsky. In April 2011, Republican Congressman Jim McGovern introduced the Justice for Sergei Magnitsky bill to the US Congress, and in May, Benjamin Cardin introduced his own bill, also dedicated to the deceased lawyer, to the US Senate. Unlike McGovern, who suggested imposing visa and financial sanctions only on those involved in the Magnitsky case, Cardin expanded the list to include high-ranking officials and others responsible for other human rights violations as well. On December 14, 2012, President Obama signed the Magnitsky Act. In response, the State Duma adopted the Dima Yakovlev Law. In the "Cardin" list of 2010, the highest-ranking classmate of Vladimir Putin in the law faculty of Leningrad State University was Lieutenant General Alexei Anichin, then head of the Investigative Committee of the Russian Federation. There are already 282 people on Congressman McGovern's list from April 2013, and among them there are many more "importants". For example, the chairman of the Investigative Committee of the Russian Federation and again a classmate of Putin Alexander Bastrykin and Prosecutor General Yuri Chaika. The chairman of the Moscow City Court, Olga Yegorova, also entered the list. In total, there are 52 judges on this list - from the Moscow City Court, from district and arbitration courts. Each of these men and women in robes, at least once in their practice, put their signatures under some kind of court decision related to Sergei Magnitsky. Some of them extended the measure of restraint for Magnitsky, who was still alive, while others denied his lawyers an appeal against the actions of investigators investigating his death in a pre-trial detention center.

I read the names of the judges and found odious names - these are those who made decisions on the detention of the “prisoners of Bolotnaya”, here is Tatyana Vasyuchenko from the Presnensky court, who convicted Alexei Kozlov, Irina Kolesnikova, who passed the verdict in the first “YUKOS case”. This was long before Magnitsky. And it was clear that these judges were "smeared" in many cases, and their presence on the list was logical.

And how did judge Lyubov Nikolenko from the Moscow City Court get here? She has quite a decent reputation among lawyers and journalists. Judge of the Tverskoy Court Yevgeny Komissarov I liked at all, last week he denied the former Minister of Communications Leonid Reiman in a completely unfounded, from my point of view, claim for the protection of honor and dignity, which he filed with my son, a journalist who wrote an article about him. I was not at all ready to see their names on this list. Just because, despite everything I know about the Russian court, I always had the hope that there are miracles, there are exceptions.

But... The new "Magnitsky list". He is terrible. All these investigators, prosecutors, prison doctors, heads of pre-trial detention centers bear personal responsibility both for the death of Magnitsky and for the death of other prisoners who died in prisons before the verdict. All of them "checked in" not only in the Magnitsky case. I am sure that tens and hundreds of people who read these names find their "bloodlines" in them.

They find those who, in their opinion, “sculpted” cases and sent their sons, daughters, husbands and wives to long years of imprisonment. A huge army of people today is avenged by the very existence of this list. And do not tell me that those who compiled the list could make a mistake in personalities and, perhaps, not all of them are worthy of public contempt. How many people do we know who in recent years have left the investigation, the prosecutor's office or the judiciary in protest against its degradation? Units.

And if so, then they are guilty. If only because they participate in the daily routine meanness and are on the same team with those who order and conduct this meanness.

Time will pass, power will change, and to the question of grandchildren or journalists, “Why did you do this?” - they will say, as the judges who sent my grandfather to be shot, and the judges who tried my dissident parents, said before them: “There was such a time, what could we do?”