Lake: Will Congress Pressure Russia on Rights?
Eli Lake writes in The New Republic:
In 2007, a Russian businessman named Oleg Derapaska applied for a multiple-entry visa to enter the United States. Derapaska certainly had some impressive credentials—he is one of the richest men in Russia, with a fortune of $10.7 billion as of 2010, which he made initially by cornering Russia’s aluminum market. He is well traveled, and is the owner of a £25 million home in the Belgravia neighborhood of London. The State Department nevertheless turned him down (though it did grant him a one-time entry visa in 2009). Derapaska’s visa troubles stemmed from allegations that he also has close ties to Russia’s mafia, according to the Wall Street Journal and other news outlets. Although he has been seeking the multiple-entry visa ever since—last year, the Russian foreign ministry even hired the Endeavor Group, the same lobbying firm that represents Angelina Jolie, to help secure him one—so far his efforts have been futile.
Other Russian oligarchs and prominent officials may soon find themselves in a similarly tricky situation. Last September, Senator Ben Cardin introduced a little-heralded piece of legislation that would ban the issuance of visas to Russian officials implicated in the torture and death of a Moscow tax lawyer named Sergei Magnitsky in 2009. Magnitsky had exposed a ring of corrupt officials from the powerful interior ministry, in what is considered the biggest case of tax fraud in modern Russian history. For his troubles, he was tortured and kept in isolation in a Russian prison for a year before dying in police custody. Derapaska’s visa controversy, along with Cardin’s bill, hints at a long overdue shift in U.S. policy towards human rights abuses in Russia. For decades, the United States’ greatest efforts on behalf of human rights in the country have focused on pressuring it to allow its citizens the freedom to travel and emigrate. Now, it seems, one of the most effective things the United States could do might be the reverse: restricting the freedom to travel of its top human rights abusers.
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