Khodorkovsky & Lebedev Communications Center

With so much political capital invested in the "reset" of relations between the United States and Russia, including the cancellation of missile shield sites, disengagement from Georgia and Ukraine, and strategic arms treaties, one might have assumed that we would observe a similar retreat from criticism as the State Department presented its yearly report on human rights in the world. The cynics, however, must have been surprised to see Sec. of State Hillary Clinton deliver a fair yet sharp condemnation - striking a dissonant note from the love-fest recently enjoyed by President Dmitry Medvedev in France.

In the Russia section of the Country Reports of the 2009 Human Rights Report just released by the State Department, the authors waste no time in reporting that the electoral process which brought the current president into office was "neither fair nor free, and failed to meet many international standards for democratic elections," before going on to condemn the murders of journalists, disappearances in the Caucasus, persecution against religious minorities, and a variety of other problems.

Of particular interest to this website is of course the sections dealing with trial procedures and political prisoners. The authors cite a Council of Europe report, which found that "judges routinely received intimidating telephone calls from superiors instructing them how to rule in specific cases, with particular emphasis placed on delivering convictions at any cost," and also point to ECHR statistics showing that "159 violations by the country involving the right to a fair trial and 20 violations involving proceedings that exceeded a "reasonable" length of time." Among the list of political prisoners figures both Mikhail Khodorkovsky and Platon Lebedev, though no mention is made of the currently ongoing second trial.

There is also a dramatic section detailing the death of Hermitage lawyer Sergei Magnitsky:

On November 17, 37-year-old lawyer Sergei Magnitsky died in the infirmary of Moscow's Butyrsky Prison. Magnitsky had worked as a lawyer for Hermitage Capital, an investment fund that accused Interior Ministry officials Artyom Kuznetsov and Pavel Karpov of stealing 5.4 billion rubles ($179 million) in a tax fraud scheme. After Magnitsky gave testimony in court in 2008 against Kuznetsov and Karpov, officials charged and arrested him on tax evasion charges that many observers believed were fabricated. After a year in pretrial detention, Magnitsky developed an infection in his pancreas but was refused medical treatment and died. The official report of his cause of death was heart failure, which was widely considered to be a false diagnosis intended to hide the decision to deny him medical treatment. A number of human rights activists believed Magnitsky's death to have been either deliberate or the result of an attempt to pressure him to change his testimony against Kuznetsov and Karpov. In the aftermath of Magnitsky's death, there were a number of official investigations into treatment of prisoners, and more than 20 officials in the prison system were fired. In December, the Justice Ministry announced a formal criminal investigation into Magnitsky's death, but no one had been criminally charged by year's end.

Bill Browder of Hermitage, Magnitsky's former employer, welcomed these comments from the U.S. government with a statement: "Sergei Magnitsky was arrested for speaking out against corruption in Russia. He was an ordinary man who died an extraordinary hero for refusing to abandon his belief in the rule of law. This report is a strong call for those officials responsible for Sergei's death to be immediately brought to justice."

Upon review, it appears that Russia was not conceded much relief in terms of silence over human rights issues as part of the reset policy. This is all the more surprising given Hillary Clinton's personal role as the public face of the effort, even appearing next to Sergei Ivanov with the cleverly designed (but poorly translated) big red reset button. But there is definitely an ebb and flow in terms of how vocal the U.S. government is willing to be on these issues, and what strategic imperatives are at hand when these kinds of reports and statements are being made ... and that certainly has been the case among either Republican or Democrat administrations.

But perhaps that's one of our biggest problems: we assume that if Russia goes along with the reset plan, responds with a few concessions here and there and a couple quid pro quo (such as backing some watered down sanctions on Iran), that this in effect would become the "currency" to purchase the world's silence on human rights? Diplomatically, I think that Russia's partners should contribute to getting at the solutions to some of these human rights problems instead of only making embarrassing complaints as leverage for other political goods - because in this case the problem actually exists and won't be going away no matter which direction the relationship goes in.

That's why it's good to see this one dissonant note from within the heart of the reset policy - it's like a small reminder that interests and values need not always be mutually exclusive.

By James Kimer, Guest Commentator to the Khodorkovsky and Lebedev Communications Center