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| A tombstone on the grave of lawyer Sergei Magnitsky |
It sounds like
something out of a Nikolai Gogol story, but it's true: Sergei Magnitsky, killed
by abuse and neglect in a Russian prison at the age of 37, is now on trial more
than three years after his death.
On Tuesday a
Russian court held the second hearing of a sham trial to convict him
posthumously of tax evasion. That hearing was postponed at the request of
Magnitsky's state-appointed defense attorney, who pleaded for more time to
prepare a defense.
Assuming this
gesture was not part of the charade, he needn't have bothered. As in the show
trials of the 1930s, the outcome is assured. The whole point of putting this
dead man on trial is to secure a conviction and rob the victim of his status as
an international martyr. Last year the U.S. passed the Magnitsky Act, which
sanctions and bans from travel to the U.S. Russians implicated in his murder.
Some countries in Europe may do the same.
The Putin government
has no interest in seeing Magnitsky's name cleared. Yet it is revealing that
Moscow feels bound to produce a verdict. Even Vladimir Putin's Russia seeks to
adopt the trappings if not the substance of criminal justice.
Magnitsky's real
"crime," the one for which he was killed, was to expose official
corruption and the theft of state assets after his client, investor Bill
Browder of Hermitage Capital, was expelled from Russia in 2005 and forced to
liquidate his holdings there. Perhaps conscious of the absurdity of trying a
corpse, prosecutors last week added Mr. Browder to the dock in absentia. So the
world will be treated to the spectacle of a trial of a dead man and a foreigner
living in Britain—all to improve the image of Putin's regime.
The Russian state,
in its benevolence, granted the defense attorney the time he requested this
week. But there can be no stay of execution for Sergei Magnitsky, and his trial
deserves the full measure of the world's contempt.
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