Russia continues to cover up the “true causes” of the death of Sergei Magnitsky, the State Department said in response to new Russian allegations that a U.S.-born critic of President Vladimir Putin had him killed.
“Rather than concocting more spurious charges, the authorities in Russia should conduct a credible investigation into the true causes of Magnitsky’s death, something they have refused to do for nine years now,” a State Department spokesperson told the Washington Examiner.
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Russia alleged Monday that Bill Browder, a former hedge fund manager who worked with Magnitsky, had the attorney and other business associates poisoned. It’s the latest accusation that Russian authorities have leveled against Browder, who developed into the most prominent international critic of Putin’s human rights record in the years since Magnitsky reported that Russian officials had used a Browder company to carry out a $230 million state-sanctioned tax fraud.
“We won’t let [Browder] sleep peacefully,” Russian Prosecutor General Yury Chaika said in June.
Browder has led an international effort to impose sanctions on human rights violators through the passage of laws named for Magnitsky, who died in Russian government custody after blowing the whistle on the tax fraud. He has celebrated Russia’s allegations against him as proof that the U.S.-passed Magnitsky Act is hurting Putin and his allies.
“If you go after Putin’s money via the biggest oligarchs, as the U.S. has just started to do, that will stop him,” Browder told Reuters earlier this year. “That is a checkmate situation.”
Russia arranged to have Browder arrested in Spain in May, but Interpol authorities intervened to secure his release. The new accusations against Browder coincided with new reports that former Russian general Alexander Prokopchuk is likely to be elected to lead Interpol on Wednesday.
“It would be an absurd and Kafkaesque scenario if — rather than Russia being suspended — one of Putin’s henchmen were to become the leader of one of the world’s most important law enforcement institutions,” Browder wrote in a Washington Post column published Monday.
A bipartisan group of senators agree.
“Interpol electing Maj. Gen. Alexander Prokopchuk as its new president is akin to putting a fox in charge of a henhouse,” Sen. Roger Wicker, R-Miss., Sen. Jeanne Shaheen, D-N.H., Sen. Chris Coons, D-Del., and Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., said Monday. “We have no doubt that Mr. Prokopchuk will further institutionalize the abuse of Interpol red notices and block ongoing efforts at meaningful reform. Further, the potential access he would gain to sensitive law enforcement data will bolster the Kremlin’s ability to harass critics living outside of Russia and aid other authoritarian regimes seeking to do the same.”
Putin’s team accused the senators of “meddling in the electoral process” that governs Interpol. “This is probably some kind of meddling in the electoral process, in elections to an international organization,” Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said Tuesday, according to TASS, a state-run media outlet. “Nevertheless, the elections will take place, so let’s wait for the results.”
