SOCIETY

Russia’s Investigative Committee has blamed prison doctors for the death of lawyer Sergei Magnitsky – the first time the country’s law enforcement agencies have admitted he was killed unlawfully.

The announcement is prompting Russian media to speculate that a new “doctors’ plot” is being hatched to find a scapegoat in the case – a reference to Stalin’s last purge shortly before his death in 1953, in which Jewish doctors were accused of trying to poison the dictator.

Magnitsky, who worked for Bill Browder’s hedge fund, Hermitage Capital, died in pre-trial detention at Matrosskaya Tishina prison in November 2009. Heart failure is still the official cause of death. 

The announcement came on Monday, a day before President Dmitry Medvedev told the Kremlin’s human rights council that Magintsky’s death should have been avoided by releasing him from jail.

‘Positive, but insufficient’

Human rights activists said the investigators’ announcement was a positive, but insufficient shift in official policy.

“It was said earlier that [Magnitsky] died on his own, that nobody was to blame. Now it is at least acknowledged that he wasn’t provided with medical care,” Valery Borshchev, a member of the Moscow Helsinki Group, told The Moscow News. “Now the doctors’ fault is admitted, which is right because they are indeed guilty. But it’s still not enough. The investigators are to blame too, including Investigation Committee [official] Alexei Anichin, Matrosskaya Tishina governor Alexei Potapenko and Butyrka prison governor Dmitry Komnov.”

Borshchev said law enforcement agencies had yet to properly consider evidence that Magintsky was beaten to death in jail, and to probe officials involved in investigating Magnitsky’s death who themselves were accused by Magnitsky and Browder of fraud.

Medvedev ‘very sad’

On Tuesday, at a hearing of the Kremlin human rights council in Nalchik, Magnitsky’s hometown, Medvedev described the case as “a very sad one. Ailing people shouldn’t die in prison. If they fall ill, they must be taken out for treatment before a court decides their fate.”

Kirill Kabanov, head of the National Anti-Corruption Committee and a member of the Kremlin’s Human Rights Council, welcomed Medvedev’s intervention.

“From the very beginning we wanted [the investigation] not to be demonstrative,” Kabanov told The Moscow News. “It happened due to the president’s initiative to explore this issue thoroughly.  From the very beginning this work was conducted together with the investigation to reveal cause-and-effect relations, including corruption in the Magnitsky case.”

The corruption issues related to Magnitsky’s case are the most difficult to unravel, Kabanov said.

Shortly before his arrest and detention in late 2008, Magnitsky accused some Interior Ministry officials of embezzlement and illegally obtaining a tax refund of 5.4 billion rubles. Russian investigators have not yet proven a link between Magnitsky's death and such fraudulent activities, however.

Tit-for-tat bills

The Magnitsky affair has led to two tit-for-tat pieces of proposed legislation – one in the United States and the other in Russia – as well as sanctions from the Dutch parliament.

US Senator Ben Cardin has put forward a bill to Congress calling for about 60 people allegedly involved in Magnitsky’s death to have sanctions applied against them, including the revocation of US visas.

In response, a proposal from Federation Council senator Alexander Torshin’s bill would allow Russia to take counter-measures against foreign officials who are adjudged to have damaged Russian citizens abroad.

Borshchev said that unless Russia took action against corrupt officials implicated in the Magnitsky case, Russians would probably be targeted by bills such as Cardin’s in the U.S.

“If those who are guilty are not punished in this country, there is going to be a chain reaction and a Magnitsky bill will be passed elsewhere,” he told The Moscow News.