UN Takes On Magnitsky Case

Dramatic news today in the ongoing campaign to bring justice to the family and colleagues of murdered lawyer Sergei Magnitsky.  The Washington Post reports on the filing made to the United Nations on behalf of the human rights NGO Redress:

Redress filed a 100-page document with U.N. special rapporteurs – independent experts on human rights issues – alleging that Magnitsky’s “inhuman detention conditions, the isolation from his family, the lack of regular access to his lawyers and the intentional refusal to provide adequate medical assistance resulted in the deliberate infliction of severe pain and suffering, and ultimately his death.”

Redress asserted that Magnitsky was held under dire conditions in an effort to pressure him to retract his testimony against Russian officials and place the blame for the $230 million dollar tax fraud elsewhere, calling his treatment so severe that it violated the U.N. Convention Against Torture.

“We thought the Magnitsky case demonstrated the general failures apparent in the Russian legal system,” Juergen Schurr, Redress’s legal adviser, said from London. “The very legal system he believed in failed him. That’s the kind of case we deal with in our work.”