Europarlementsleden maken vuist voor mensenrechten in visumkwestie Russische diplomaten (en)

EUOBSERVER / BRUSSELS - Bill Browder, the CEO of US firm Hermitage Capital, has told EUobserver that he will use Schengen Zone rules to push for an EU-wide travel ban on 60 Russian officials accused of complicity in murder in light of a new European Parliament resolution.

"In the Schengen Zone it only requires one country to impose travel sanctions on the Russian torturers and all the Schengen countries have to follow," he told this website by phone from London on Thursday (16 December). "The next step will be to approach individual member states with hard evidence on the people who murdered and tortured Sergey Magnitsky in order to implement this resolution."

"We have a list of names and documents with peoples' signatures on them denying Sergey Magnitsky the medical treatment that he needed. Documents with signatures on his false arrest. Documents with signatures denying him any contacts with his family for 12 months. We'll go one by one through all the member states."

His remarks come after the EU parliament the same day in Strasbourg endorsed a resolution calling for the EU "to consider imposing an EU entry ban for Russian officials involved in this case and encourages EU law enforcement agencies to co-operate in freezing bank accounts and other assets of these Russian officials in all EU member states."

Mr Browder pointed out that Polish foreign minister Radek Sikorski in a letter to left-wing Polish MP Ryszard Kalisz in September said Warsaw would consider backing a visa ban if "international institutions [establish] a list of persons, who were involved in the death."

The Hermitage Capital list of 60 names includes: Alexei Anichin, the head of the Investigative Committee in the Russian interior ministry; Viktor Voronin, the chief of the FSB's Economic Espionage cell; Viktor Grin, the Deputy General Prosecutor; Dmitriy Komnov, head of pre-trial detention at the Butyrka prison; Larisa Litvinova, chief of medical care at the jail; and 11 judges.

European Commission spokesman Michele Cercone confirmed that under the Schengen Border Code: "If someone is put on the list by a state of the Schengen Area, then other countries cannot give visas to the person that is in the system ... That's how it works."

Mr Browder added: "It is surprising that the Russian government and the Russian parliament have so aggressively defended known torturers and murderers, which translates this crime from an individual crime of corrupt officials into a state-sponsored crime."

Mr Magnitsky, a 37-year-old father-of-two, died in a Russian jail in 2009 after investigating an alleged €175 million embezzlement scam by Russian police. There has been no Russian probe into his death and some of the officials he accused of fraud have been promoted.

Finnish green MEP Heidi Hautala and Dutch liberal deputy Marietje Schaake, the authors of the parliament's Magnitsky resolution, which was inserted into a broader report on EU human rights policy, said in an emailed statement: "It is our wish that none of these sanctions will ever have to be put in place. Instead, we hope to receive the news without delay that effective investigations ... have finally commenced."

The Russian ambassador to the EU, Vladimir Chizhov, who was in Strasbourg on Thursday, could not immediately be contacted for a comment. But the Russian Duma earlier warned that if the Hautala-Schaake proposal got through: "Relations between the Russian Federation and the European Union will be seriously damaged."

In other reactions to the broader EU human rights report, NGO Human Rights Watch urged EU foreign relations chief Catherine Ashton to create a human rights directorate in her European External Action Service, appoint high-level EEAS human rights representatives and make sure that EU countries' diplomats who take part in the so-called Cohom working group on human rights in the EU Council are permanently stationed in Brussels instead of dropping in for occasional meetings from capitals.

The EU parliament's Intergroup on LGBT (lesbian, gay, bisexual and intersex) rights also welcomed the report's strong wording on EU international policing of persecution on grounds of sexual orientation.

"MEPs across the political spectrum sent a clear message that human rights are no bargaining token: they are universal, indivisible, and apply equally to lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people regardless of where they live," Austrian green MEP Ulrike Lunacek said in a written communique.