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.”
The AmLaw Daily: From Russia With Fear
March 25, 2010
When he opened his law and audit firm Firestone Duncan in Moscow in 1993, Jamison Firestone saw Russia as a land of opportunity. Today, he is essentially exiled abroad, managing his business from thousands of miles away, and afraid of what could happen to him should he return to the city he called home for 17 years.
Firestone decamped to London in December after a lawyer from his firm died amid mysterious circumstances in a Moscow pretrial detention facility and in the midst of a long-running investigation by Russian authorities into one of his firm’s clients, Hermitage Capital Management.
Radio Free Europe: Is Anarchism Russia’s Solution?
March 22, 2010
A column by Russian TV journalist Andrei Loshak is making waves in Russia, with over 400,000 people having read it so far. (Read it in English here.)
In the piece, Loshak detects a major change in the public attitude to the state. “Instead of anxiety and apathy,” he argues, “wrath comes to the fore.” Furthermore, he answers the two eternal, “cursed questions” of Russian thinking about society: “Who is guilty?” and “What is to be done?”
Loshak’s answer: the state is to be held responsible, and the solution, surprisingly enough, is anarchism.
OpenSpace.ru: Kafka’s Castle is collapsing
March 19, 2010
Kafka’s Castle is collapsing
You can’t reason with the absurd, as IKEA found when it tried to build a model business in Russia. Institutional corruption is out of control. Kafka’s Castle is finally collapsing. This is good news, as Russians, ordinary Russians are losing their fear. Now they’re just angry, says Andrei Loshak.
The Economist: Cops for hire
March 19, 2010
Reforming Russia’s violent and corrupt police will not be easy
THEY shoot, beat and torture civilians, confiscate businesses and take hostages. They are feared and distrusted by two-thirds of the country. But they are not foreign occupiers, mercenaries or mafia; they are Russia’s police officers. The few decent cops among them are seen as mould-breaking heroes and dissidents.
Daily reports of police violence read like wartime bulletins. Recent cases include a random shooting by a police officer in a Moscow supermarket (seven wounded, two dead), the gruesome torture and killing of a journalist in Tomsk, and the case of Sergei Magnitsky, a young lawyer for an American investment fund. He was denied medical treatment and died in pre-trial detention in Moscow having accused several police officers of fraud.
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