Russia convicts dead man

A Moscow court yesterday found the investment-fund lawyer Sergei Magnitsky guilty of tax evasion in Russia's first posthumous trial.

The verdict will further undermine President Vladimir Putin's reputation in the West.

The court also convicted Magnitsky's former client, William Browder, a Briton who has spearheaded an international campaign to expose corruption and punish Russian officials he blames for Magnitsky's death in a Moscow jail in 2009 while awaiting trial.

Browder, tried in absentia, was sentenced to nine years in prison.

The case has exposed yet again the dangers faced by Russians who challenge the authorities under Putin, and has deepened US and European concern about human rights and the rule of law.

"Today's verdict will go down in history as one of the most shameful moments for Russia since the days of Joseph Stalin," Browder, who lives in Britain and is unlikely to be extradited to Russia, said.

Magnitsky died after a year in jail. He said he was mistreated and denied medical care in an effort to get him to confess to tax evasion and give evidence against Browder, the head of investment fund Hermitage Capital Management.

The Kremlin's own human rights council has said there was evidence that Magnitsky, 37, was beaten to death. But Putin has dismissed allegations of torture, saying Magnitsky died of heart failure.

Nobody has been convicted of killing Magnitsky and a judge threw out a case against a senior prison official after Putin signalled that the Russian authorities must not be blamed.

After lobbying by Browder, the US Congress passed the Magnitsky Act, which bars Russians believed to have been involved in his death, or in other severe human rights abuses, from entering the US, and freezes their assets in the US.

Putin, who accuses the US of using human rights concerns as a pretext for meddling in Russia's affairs, swiftly retaliated by imposing similar measures on Americans and barring US couples from adopting Russian children.

"This show trial confirms that Putin is ready to sacrifice his international credibility to protect corrupt officials who murdered an innocent lawyer and stole $230-million from the Russian state," Hermitage Capital said.

FLOGGING THE DECEASED

THE tax-evasion conviction of lawyer Sergei Magnitsky more than three years after his death is not the first time the dead have been put on trial. Here are some other examples.

• Joan of Arc - The French peasant teen who led the French army to victories in the Hundred Years War was tried for heresy and burned at the stake in 1431.

But a quarter of a century later, Pope Callixtus III ordered a new trial. The proceedings described her as a martyr and said she was falsely convicted. She was canonised as a saint in 1920.

• Oliver Cromwell - In 17th-century England, Cromwell signed the death warrant for King Charles I, taking harsh measures against Catholics and demonstrating brutal military brilliance. Though he never faced trial dead or alive, he did suffer a posthumous "execution". In 1661, Cromwell's corpse was exhumed and decapitated, and his head was displayed on a pole for years.
• Martin Bormann - Adolf Hitler's personal secretary was tried in absentia at Nuremberg and sentenced to death.

In 1972, during construction work in downtown Berlin, bones were unearthed that were identified as having belonged to Bormann through dental records. - Sapa-AP