Comment: Dissident’s case exposes rot at the heart of Russia

Published 1:30 am Tuesday, April 18, 2023

By Pedro Pizano / Special to The Washington Post

Vladimir Kara-Murza has the same jailer that Sergei Magnitsky had. That fact alone tells you something important about the rot at the heart of the Russian system.

Fourteen years ago, Dmitry Komnov was serving as the warden of Moscow’s notorious Butyrka prison. One of his prisoners was a man named Sergei Magnitsky, a corporate lawyer who had accused high-ranking members of Russian law enforcement of involvement in a corruption scheme. Instead of acting to prosecute those responsible, the Russian authorities pinned the crime on Magnitsky and threw him in prison. In November 2009, Magnitsky died in custody at 37.

Human rights defenders accused the prison authorities — including Komnov — of denying Magnitsky urgently needed medical care. They also alleged that Magnitsky had been abused during his imprisonment, specifically citing an assault by truncheon-wielding attackers in his cell.

Among those making these accusations was opposition activist Vladimir Kara-Murza. Soon, in alliance with Magnitsky’s erstwhile client, the British businessman Bill Browder, Kara-Murza became one of the most prominent members of an international campaign to impose sanctions on the specific officials implicated in Magnitsky’s death. Over the past few years, that campaign — departing from the standard practice of broad sanctions targeting entire countries or organizations — has had remarkable success. What began as an effort to punish the culprits in the Magnitsky case has since expanded to encompass human rights abusers around the world.

The U.S. Treasury included Komnov in its first list of Russian officials targeted by visa bans and asset seizures in 2013. Yet, today, Kara-Murza is himself imprisoned in Moscow — on Monday he was found guilty and sentenced to 25 years in prison on bogus treason charges for criticizing Russia’s war in Ukraine — and Komnov, the man he was instrumental in exposing to international censure, is his jailer.

Imagine the situation: You accuse a cohort of law-enforcement officials of corruption and play a leading role in efforts to make them accountable. Later on, when you criticize the government, you find yourself under arrest; and one of the men you exposed is in charge of your prison.

The United States and other democratic countries have laws on the books that prevent just this sort of thing from happening. You’re not supposed to end up in a detention facility run by a warden you’ve publicly accused of malfeasance.

This is not the only miscarriage of justice in the case of Kara-Murza, who is a contributing columnist for The Washington Post. He was on trial on treason charges — inspired in part by his harsh criticism of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s war in Ukraine — after spending a year in pretrial detention.

His trial is taking place against the backdrop of new Magnitsky sanctions imposed on six individuals involved in Kara-Murza’s arbitrary detention.

Sergei Podoprigorov was one of the judges in the three-person panel that passed judgment on Kara-Murza. Podoprigorov has been sanctioned by the United States, Britain and Canada (though not by the European Union). As a judge at Moscow’s Tverskoy court in 2008, it was Podoprigorov who sent Magnitsky to Butyrka.

A third Magnitsky List target currently involved in Kara-Murza’s case is the head of the Russian Investigative Committee, Alexander Bastrykin, who ended up on the list specifically on the initiative of opposition leader Boris Nemtsov and Kara-Murza. He is personally overseeing Kara-Murza’s case. Bastrykin has been sanctioned by the United States, Britain, Australia, Canada and the E.U.

Kara-Murza’s wife, Evgenia, noted to me in an email: “So three people already under Magnitsky sanctions, two of them complicit in Sergei’s murder, are handling the case of my husband, who’s been fiercely campaigning for the introduction of the Magnitsky legislation since 2010.”

In fact, Kara-Murza has been unlawfully detained because he spoke the truth about the policies of the Putin regime. His treatment by officials continues to show the threat the Kremlin poses to democratic values around the world. The international community must continue to express its concern over the treatment of Kara-Murza and other political prisoners who have been jailed for aspiring to build a democratic Russia as well as for opposing the war.

Exposing these horrendous actions by the Putin regime is necessary and requires tireless work from democratic society. The Kremlin must release Kara-Murza, Alexei Navalny (now reportedly in critical condition after a suspected poisioning), Ilya Yashin and the thousands of others who have been imprisoned for exercising their rights to free speech by criticizing Russian aggression against Ukraine.

Pedro Pizano is assistant director for the democracy and human rights programs at the McCain Institute for International Leadership in Washington.