Legal breathing

In the impatience with whom Russia's officials expected the publication of the Magnitsky list, there were a lot of hysterical masochism. Deputy Prime Minister Vladislav Surkov said that he would honor the honor of including himself in the list. Following Surkov, Rivne was repeated by the chairman of the Investigative Committee, Alexander Bastrykin. If Surkov’s statement can still see a kind of elegance (he said this in December last year, when such an opportunity was purely theoretical), then in the words of Bastrykin said in March, when the list was on the way, nervousness is already felt.

It got to the point that the deputy of the Leningrad Region, Vladimir Petrov, asked Barack Obama to enter his list and his name. “To you and your colleagues,” the deputy writes, “there is no emotion to Magnitsky - this is just a diving instrument ... Mr. President Obama, if you see the meaning in my sentence - do not ceremony. I don’t guarantee, but then I will try to talk with my party comrades, and with friends, relatives, we will find more volunteers.”

This is right from Gogol: "Yes, if this and the sovereign has to, then tell the sovereign that, they say, your imperial majesty, Peter Ivanovich Bobchinsky lives in such a city."

You look what a quick! The place on the Magnitsky list must still be earned.

A little more - and Russian officials would probably bother, hire lobbyists, bribes to poke the senators for making themselves on the list. Only in Russia they can make PR out of shame.

But the list is published - and in Moscow they cannot hide a sigh of relief.

Noting that there are no high-level officials on the list, the prominent, obathurant deputy Leonid Slutsky says : "This remains a provocation, but the degree of this provocation decreases." “We are not interested in the escalation of tension and escalating the spirit of ill -wishes in bilateral relations,” says Mikhail Margelov, chairman of the upper household committee on international affairs. And the deputy of the Duma Alexei Mitrofanov believes that the US administration showed prudence and has achieved a compromise with Congress.

The list really turned out to be short. On the one hand, this is due to certain procedural problems. The recently spoke about them by the deputy Secretary of State for Democracy, Human Rights and Labor Law Michael Pozner (since then he has left his post, which is still vacant). It is easy to close the entrance to the country, he said . "Control over bank assets is a much more difficult task for a number of reasons. The Ministry of Finance has very disabilities for exercising such control. We mixed one heap and both of them and thereby, I think, lost the opportunity to introduce a simple and effective measure. Thus, we were in a position where the norm established by the US Ministry of Finance control should become the norm of visa regime."

Indeed, a visa refusal is a routine procedure. The government is not even obliged to explain the reason for the refusal. For example, Oleg Deripaska was deprived of the right to enter the United States for more than 10 years. Perennial " refuser " - Joseph Kobzon. In November 2011, Major General Nikolai Shelepanov, the head of the Major General, and the first deputy head of the same department, Lieutenant General Tatyana Gerasimova, could not come to the United States (since then she lost her position), and the border barrier in front of them fell at the insistent of the initiator of the Magnitsky Senator Ben Cardin. The Law of Magnitsky was not there then. Meanwhile, more thorough reasons are needed to freeze assets, because, in contrast to a visa refusal, the arrest of a bank account and property can be disputed in court.

The truth is that the Barack Obama administration struggled to the adoption of the Magnitsky law and remains its opponent today. Michael Posner also said about this: "Our government rejected the concept of the law as a whole, and it was adopted contrary to our objections." The objections, of course, are not only a procedural order, but also political. Is it surprising that the State Department and the Ministry of Finance, which the president instructed to draw up a list, made it as short as possible.

Moscow’s answer was not long in coming. It turned out to be exactly as many names as in the open part of the American list. Personal sanctions were imposed on the basis of the "Law of Dima Yakovlev." The compilers of the "anti -Magnitite list" do not hide that this is revenge for the American list.

But thereby they confirm that in Russia the law is drawn. After all, the law must act on its own, and not in response to the sanctions of other countries. It turns out that if not for the list of magnetic, malicious violators of human rights would have remained unpunished.

The official representative of the Russian Foreign Ministry, Alexander Lukashevich, claims that the American list was compiled "arbitrarily", and worked carefully on the Russian. But if you compare the texts, it turns out that the Magnitsky law is much more about the basis for imposing sanctions against an individual. It also contains the grounds and the procedure for exclusion from the list. In the " Law of Dima Yakovlev " there is nothing of the kind.

The Russian list consists of two parts. The first names of four people "involved in legalization and the use of torture, the unlimited content of prisoners (" Guantanamo List ") are introduced. Two of these persons - David Eddington and John Yu - lawyers. The first worked as the chief of the apparatus of Vice President Cheney, the second headed a group of legal advisers of the US Department of Justice. The actions of both really became the subject of a thorough trial in the Congress. However, the then Minister of Justice, Michael Murukeni, eventually came to the conclusion that legal advisers cannot be punished: they do not make decisions, they only express opinions. The legalization of torture would be the adoption of the law, but not an expert opinion. Eddington and Yu were twice defendants in investigations in other countries: in 2006 in Germany and in 2009 in Spain . Both attempts ended in refusing to initiate proceedings. Congress had serious complaints against General Jeffrey Miller, who was in charge of prisons in Iraq (Abu Graib) and in the Gulf of Guantanamo. He was accused , in particular, for perjury. But in the end, he resigned in 2006 with the world. As for Admiral Jeffrey Harbison, who was also in the “Guantanamo list”, he commanded a prison in Cuba for only about a year, already under President Obama, when controversial methods of interrogation were already officially prohibited. Nevertheless, in January of this year, he was denied an entry visa to Russia, despite the fact that he currently holds an important post in the United Committee of Chiefs of Staff.

Claims to military and lawyers would not have looked like a pure hypocrisy and would have at least some kind of common sense if Russia was really concerned with the fate of the prisoners of Guantanamo. But President Putin, who many times referred to the atrocities of the coaters and investigators, each time did this only snapping in response to American accusations. Moscow never brought official protests and in bilateral negotiations this issue did not raise, at least publicly.

Moreover. In April 2002, representatives of the Prosecutor General’s Office of the Russian Federation visited the Gulf of Gulf, but also did not make any public statements regarding the regime or methods of interrogation of prisoners. They were there for another purpose - to take testimonies from the "Russian Taliban" and initiate a criminal case against them. It is not surprising that one of them categorically refused to meet, and the other described his conversation with the visitor as follows: “The investigator of the Prosecutor General’s Office arrived at Guantanamo. He told us:“ Here you will be for life, and you can get rid of it for a time. Big, but not eternal. So admit. "

The case comes out, the Russian investigator helped the American! At the same time, the Russian side persistently achieved extradition , and the "Russian Taliban" resisted this struggle.

But the Americans did not find the corpus delicti in their actions and deported them to their homeland. The Motherland put them in jail and tried to concoct a criminal case for four months, but could not : “They held for another four months in the White Swan prison, Pyatigorsk. They didn’t beat, interrogated about America and our allegedly Talibanism. And then they let go, all seven. They said:“ The decision is political. ”

Despite the release, the former Taliban remained under the strict observation of the organs and periodically delayed on suspicion of various terrorist attacks. Two of them are now serving a deadline for unreasonable, according to human rights activists, accusations and are on the list of Russian political prisoners.

And this is the protection of the rights of the prisoners of Guantanamo?

Now about the second part of the list - "persons involved in violations of the rights and freedoms of Russian citizens abroad." By the mentioned persons, this refers to the "arms baron" Victor Butt and the pilot Konstantin Yaroshenko, convicted in New York for illegal weapons trafficking. It would be useful to get acquainted with the list of these violations, as is done in American law regarding Sergei Magnitsky. Since there are no such explanations, then there is nothing to talk about. Moscow, according to the latest information, still intends to achieve the deportation of both on the basis of the Convention on the transfer of convicts to imprisonment for further serving the sentence. However, the first and most important condition of such a transmission is the entry into force of the sentence (Article 5). Both Boit and Yaroshenko filed an appeal for court decisions. While the process of consideration is not completed or appeals will not be withdrawn, there is no need to talk about the transfer.

The list also has a special agent of the FBI Gregori Coleman, as if Yaroshenko, as if not involved. The correspondent of the Russian BBC Russian service Vladimir Kozlovsky suggests that he was on the list for his role in the case of Yegor Chernov, convicted of Utah for falsification of passports and already served punishment. Chernov is the brother of the former judge of the Tver court Marina Gorbacheva, who refused to compensate the victims of Nord -Ost. Otherwise, writes Kozlovsky, "his affairs were not iconic." Nevertheless, we add that murders were made with these very fake passports, including American citizens in third countries. This nice businessman Kozlovsky at one time described in all details. From the testimony of Chernov, in particular, it is clear that Gorbacheva helped his brother in his criminal business. She herself denies it. In total, most likely, the compilers of the Russian list were simply not enough for the parity of one name, and they brought the persecutor Chernov into it.