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British MPs Urge Magnitsky List Sanctions

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British lawmakers have urged the government to impose an asset freeze and travel ban against Russian officials linked to the high-profile death of lawyer Sergei Magnitsky in 2009, the BBC reported.

British lawmakers have urged the government to impose an asset freeze and travel ban against Russian officials linked to the high-profile death of lawyer Sergei Magnitsky in 2009, the BBC reported.

Conservative MP Dominic Raab said Magnitsky had been part of a "noble Russian tradition of dissidents who stood up for the rule of law, democratic reform and free speech."

Magnitsky, who was detained after accusing officials of fraud, reportedly died due to torture and neglect.

Raab's motion was supported by three former British foreign secretaries, Jack Straw, David Miliband, and Sir Malcolm Rifkind.

Two doctors were charged over Magnitsky's death in August last year.

Magnitsky was jailed in November 2008 after exposing a $230 million tax scam involving senior tax and interior ministry officials, while working for a British investment fund. He suffered deliberate neglect and beatings before dying in his cell a year later, the Kremlin's rights body said in a report last year.

"His legal team was then subject to varying forms of intimidation and, while other lawyers left Russia in fear of their lives, Magnitsky stayed on to make a stand for the rule of law in Russia and strike a blow against the breathtaking corruption that has taken place there," Raab said.

"That bravery cost him his life... In Putin's Kafkaesque Russian justice system the very tax investigators that Magnitsky exposed turned up to arrest him," Raab said.

The United States and Netherlands have placed a visa ban on 60 Russian officials linked to Magnitsky's death. Russia has responded in kind, but neither country has actually implemented the bans so far.

Last month, the European Parliament's delegation for relations with Russia called on EU member states to "immediately" impose sanctions against Russian officials thought to be implicated in the death.

Raab said the Russian authorities "blocked all attempts to bring those responsible to justice."

"All the suspects were cleared by Russian investigators. Some have been promoted, some decorated. In fact, the only people on trial are Magnitsky's employer and Magnitsky himself, now the subject of Russia's first ever posthumous prosecution," Raab said.

 

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