The NY Times: Inquiry Stalled in Death of Russian Lawyer

April 22, 2010

Two human rights campaigners said on Thursday that despite personal intervention by Russia’s president, Dmitri A. Medvedev, officials responsible for the death of a lawyer last year in pretrial detention are facing no substantial punishment.

In November, Mr. Medvedev ordered an inquiry into the treatment of Sergei L. Magnitsky, a 37-year-old lawyer who died in a prison hospital after carefully documenting his requests for medical care. Amid public outrage over the case, Mr. Medvedev dismissed around 20 prison officials and prosecutors opened an inquiry into negligence and refusal of medical care.

But five months have passed and no one has yet been charged with a crime. Lyudmila M. Alexeyeva, who sits on Mr. Medvedev’s human rights council, said she will recommend the body take control of the case, which she said “is not moving.”

“We have a vertical of power. Our president has constitutional powers no emperor ever had,” said Ms. Alexeyeva, chairwoman of the Moscow Helsinki Group. “But did that help punish those who brought Magnitsky to his death? Nothing of the kind. All those people are still working in their positions.”

“The president is indignant,” she added, “but this signal does not make its way to the bottom.”

A spokesman for the Investigative Committee of the Russian prosecutor general’s office was not available for comment.

Mr. Magnitsky had been working as outside counsel for the Hermitage Fund, whose owner, William F. Browder, had accused Russian officials of using his companies to embezzle money. Russian officials charged Hermitage with tax evasion and arrested Mr. Magnitsky. During the year Mr. Magnitsky spent in pretrial detention, his defenders say, investigators pressed him to testify against Hermitage.

Valery V. Borshchev, who heads a watchdog group that monitors prison conditions, said his organization received no response to a scathing report it submitted to prosecutors in December. He said he believed Mr. Magnitsky was intentionally denied medical care on the orders of the lead investigator in the tax-evasion case, who he said is guilty not of negligence but of a far graver crime, “intentionally creating the conditions that led to death.”

“This is not just a matter of the life and death of Sergei Magnitsky, it is a question of our entire system,” he said, adding that last year 4,600 inmates died in Russian prison colonies and 540 in pre-trial detention centers.

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