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Helsinki Commission leadership, members, and initiatives are frequently featured in both the U.S. and foreign press.

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  • Lawmakers call for crackdown on financial ‘enablers’ after Pandora Papers revelations

    A bipartisan group of lawmakers plans to introduce legislation this week that for the first time would require trust companies, lawyers, art dealers and others to investigate foreign clients seeking to move money and assets into the American financial system. The bill’s sponsors cited the findings of the Pandora Papers investigation, the result of a sweeping international collaboration published this week that exposed how the global elite conceal their wealth in tax havens that increasingly include the United States. Stories by The Washington Post and the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) showed that little-known trust companies in Sioux Falls, S.D., established nearly 30 trusts holding assets connected to people or companies accused of corruption, human rights abuses or other wrongdoing in some of the world’s poorest communities. The investigation also found that King Abdullah II of Jordan secretly used offshore companies to purchase three properties in Malibu and revealed the use of two offshore trusts by an art dealer, now deceased, who was accused by U.S. prosecutors of trafficking in looted Cambodian artifacts. The proposed law, known as the Enablers Act, would amend the 51-year-old Bank Secrecy Act, by requiring the Treasury Department to create basic due-diligence rules for American gatekeepers who facilitate the flow of foreign assets into the United States. Banks are already required to investigate their clients and sources of wealth, but trust companies, lawyers, investment advisers, accountants, art dealers, public relations firms and other professionals have been excluded from due-diligence rules — a loophole regularly criticized by financial crime experts and international watchdogs. The proposed legislation, experts say, represents the most significant change of anti-money-laundering rules since 9/11. “If we make banks report dirty money but allow law, real estate, and accounting firms to look the other way, that creates a loophole that crooks and kleptocrats can sail a yacht through,” Rep. Tom Malinowski (D-N.J.), co-sponsor of the proposed bill and co-chair of the Congressional Caucus against Foreign Corruption and Kleptocracy, said on Wednesday. “Our bill closes that loophole and encourages the administration to move in the same direction.” Malinowski called on the White House to support the legislation, co-sponsored by Reps. Steve Cohen (D-Tenn.), co-chair of the bipartisan Commission on Security and Cooperation in Europe; Joe Wilson (R-S.C.), ranking member of the commission; and Maria Elvira Salazar (R-Fla.), a member of the caucus. “All around the world, countries are being looted and the most vulnerable people victimized by their elites,” Cohen said. “These kleptocrats then launder that money to the West, where they enjoy the high life — spending the money on luxury cars, penthouses, jets and opulent parties. Some also spend it on intervening in our democracy … working to undermine the rule of law. In order to fight corruption, we must curb the enablers.” If passed, the law would give the Treasury Department until December 2023 to create anti-money-laundering rules for the gatekeeper industries. A new national security task force would oversee the effort. After 9/11, banks — criticized for serving and shielding terrorists, drug traffickers and dictators — shored up their due-diligence practices. Financial crime experts say that such measures encouraged wrongdoers to find other financial gatekeepers, including the U.S. trust industry. “Global criminals, kleptocrats, dictators, they’re going to look for new ways to launder their money and we’re going to try to close them down, but the gap right now is just massive — we basically left our financial defenses wide open,” said Paul Massaro, a congressional anti-corruption adviser who helped work on the proposed legislation. In South Dakota, now considered a top destination for global wealth, trust companies oversee more than $360 billion in assets, state data shows. The Post and the ICIJ investigation identified a series of international clients who moved their assets into trusts in South Dakota in recent years, including a Colombian textile mogul implicated in an international scheme to launder drug proceeds and a Brazilian orange juice executive accused of colluding to underpay local farmers. “Regulating professional enablers is how the United States could stop being the world’s top offshore financial haven, begin treating dirty money as a leading national threat and start demonstrating how democracies can deliver against corrupt adversaries and powerful special interests,” said Josh Rudolph, a member of the National Security Council staff in the Obama and Trump administrations who recently published an analysis on the role of financial gatekeepers. The proposed legislation comes as new information surfaces about Abdullah’s steps to contain the impact of the Pandora revelations before the articles about him were published. Newly filed U.S. federal disclosure forms show that Abdullah hired a law firm and a crisis management public relations company after learning that his use of shell companies to purchase luxury properties costing more than $106 million was about to become public. The moves reflect apparent concern about the potential fallout both in Washington and in Jordan, where there has been scant coverage of the Pandora stories and at least one news outlet said it was contacted by the Jordanian intelligence service and told to take down an article about the Abdullah revelations. The forms were filed by DLA Piper, a law firm hired by Abdullah, to comply with laws requiring U.S. firms to disclose when they have been hired to represent a foreign government. A letter attached to the filing shows that the DLA Piper was hired at an hourly rate of $1,335 to represent Abdullah “related to potential defamation and other legal remedies associated with inquiries and/or articles concerning His Majesty.” A lawyer for DLA Piper did not immediately respond to a request for comment. The firm was quoted in The Post as well as news stories saying that Abdullah had not misused aid money and that his use of offshore companies was driven by security concerns. A second federal filing shows that Abdullah and DLA Piper also hired Stripe Theory, an Atlanta-based consulting and public relations firm that describes itself online as a provider of strategic marketing advice “when your brand is on the line.” Craig Kronenberger, listed on the letter as an executive at Stripe Theory, did not respond to an email sent to his company address requesting comment.​​ On Sunday, The Post and the ICIJ broke the story about Abdullah’s property purchases in the United States. All told, 150 media partners contributed to the Pandora Papers, which revealed the financial secrets of 35 current and former world leaders and more than 330 politicians and public officials with assets around the world, including in the United States. “If we are serious about fighting dictatorship, we need U.S. professionals to do the most basic due diligence — no American should be accepting money from Chinese Communist Party operatives, Iranian mullahs, Russian oligarchs or others,” Wilson said. “The Enablers Act is a critical national security measure.”

  • The Russian election was supposed to shore up Putin’s legitimacy. It achieved the opposite.

    Electoral precinct 40, located in a charming historic area a few minutes’ walking distance from the Kremlin, is among the few in Moscow that can be trusted to count votes honestly. Ever since I first voted here at the age of 18, the official tallies have always reflected the actual votes cast. In Moscow’s 2013 mayoral election, the candidate who won the precinct was anticorruption campaigner and opposition activist Alexei Navalny. Local Muscovite pride may be one factor in this honesty; the presence of independent electoral commission members in the precinct may be another. So when I came to vote here on Sunday, and then stayed overnight to observe the count, I was certain that I would get a glimpse of the real sentiments of Russian voters. To be clear: It wasn’t an honest election. Opponents of the Kremlin, including all Navalny supporters, had been preemptively disqualified from the ballot through various bans imposed by the regime. But I did expect to see an honest count of the votes that were cast. I was proven right. The official vote tally from Precinct #40 showed the three top spots on the party list ballot divided among the Communists, Vladimir Putin’s United Russia and the liberal Yabloko party, the only genuine opposition group allowed to take part in this election. (Their shares were 27, 20 and 19 percent, respectively.) The Communist vote, usually low in Moscow, was boosted this time by support from the Navalny team, which urged voters to pick any candidates on the ballot who don’t represent United Russia — a tactic, known as “Smart Voting,” that aims to demonstrate how minimal support for the ruling party really is. On the single-member ballot (where voters choose among individual candidates rather than parties), Yabloko’s Sergei Mitrokhin won handily with 35 percent; the pro-regime candidate eked out just 14 percent. The overall official results announced next morning — both for Moscow and for Russia as a whole — might as well have come from a different country. The authorities solemnly announced that United Russia had retained its two-thirds supermajority in parliament — even though most polls (including those from government pollsters) showed support for the party in the high 20s. The rest of the seats will be filled by officially approved “opposition” parties that always end up supporting Putin’s most important initiatives. Predictably, not a single genuine opposition candidate — among the few allowed on the ballot in the first place — was actually allowed to win. This time around — in addition to traditional rigging methods such as organized voting by state employees and military conscripts, “carousel” multiple voting, and plain ballot-stuffing — the regime deployed a rather specific brand of electronic voting. When used in genuine democracies, electronic voting usually produces an outcome almost immediately. But in this election, tabulating the results took hours longer than counting traditional paper ballots — and the final result flipped at least eight Moscow districts from the opposition to United Russia. “The story with electronic voting fraud … reminds me of the switched urine samples at the 2014 Sochi Olympics,” noted political analyst Maria Snegovaya. “It was done clumsily and crudely — and by the same people, the FSB [Federal Security Service]. It seems this is the only way they can work.” In contrast to 2011, when a patently fraudulent parliamentary election brought tens of thousands of people into the streets, this time no major protests followed. Indeed, none were expected. Navalny’s arrest, and an unprecedented crackdown on opposition supporters earlier this year — with 11,000 detentions and more than 100 criminal cases against participants of pro-democracy rallies — has left Russian civil society subdued and demoralized. But this silence is deceptive. The respite for the regime will almost certainly prove to be only temporary. Recent protests and public opinion trends point to an unmistakable rise in general fatigue with one-man rule that is now stretching into its third decade. Major political change in Russia is notoriously difficult to predict — suffice it to mention the (unpredicted) political upheavals of 1905, 1917 or 1991 — but it seems likely that brewing anti-regime sentiment will burst out into the open in the spring of 2024 if Putin attempts to remain in power, in violation of the constitutional term limit he unlawfully overturned last year. It is an incontrovertible logic of history that in countries where governments cannot be changed at the ballot box, they are often changed on the streets. Russia has seen this herself, as have other countries in our post-Soviet neighborhood. It is no news to anyone that there are no real elections in Putin’s Russia. Yet international reaction to last weekend’s sham vote has been strong on both sides of the Atlantic. Lawmakers in the U.S. Congress and in the European Parliament have stated that it “severely weakens the legitimacy” of Putin’s rule. Whatever remains of that legitimacy will be finally shed in the event of Putin’s illegal prolongation of his mandate beyond 2024. European Union lawmakers have already hinted at a formal nonrecognition of any such action in the new strategy toward Russia adopted earlier this month. The year 2024 will be an important test — both for Russian society’s tolerance to autocratic rule, and for the West’s adherence to the rule of law not just in words but in practice. It’s now time to start preparing for that moment.

  • Congress takes aim at kleptocracy

    A bipartisan group of lawmakers is gearing up to make 2021 the year Congress has the bipartisan support necessary to pass sweeping legislation to fight kleptocracy. On Sept. 10, Reps. Steve Cohen, the U.S. Helsinki Commission cochair, and the committee’s ranking member, Joe Wilson, introduced the Counter-Kleptocracy Act. The legislation consolidates seven bipartisan bills that aim to tackle corruption and illicit financial flows, all of which lawmakers introduced in the past year. The Counter-Kleptocracy Act now has 17 bipartisan cosponsors. It includes legislation enabling the administration to name and shame kleptocrats banned from the U.S. and creates a public website documenting the amount of money stolen by corrupt officials in each country, among other initiatives. The game plan is to leverage the bipartisan support for the bills in the House and Senate, and to include the bills in the National Defense Authorization Act this year or next. Several of the measures have already been added to the most recent version of the House bill. Three decades after the end of the Cold War, many lawmakers in Washington recognize that, rather than adopting democratic norms and practices, corrupt officials and kleptocrats from abroad have influenced the U.S. political system and undermined national security by funneling money stolen from their own citizens into the U.S. With this in mind, fighting kleptocracy is becoming one of the standout issues that Republican and Democratic lawmakers agree about tackling. “We’ve never had more momentum on this than we have now,” said Paul Massaro, a senior policy adviser at the U.S. Helsinki Commission, who has been advocating for anti-corruption efforts in Congress for a decade. “If you told national security experts in 2014 or 2015 that corruption is a national security threat, you would get blank looks. Now Congress and the president are calling it a national security threat.” The Biden administration released a memorandum establishing the fight against corruption as a core national security interest in June. Members of Congress say they wholeheartedly agree with that assessment. “From my experience as a former CIA case officer and from my work on the House Foreign Affairs Committee, it is very clear that corruption at home and abroad is a national security threat,” said Rep. Abigail Spanberger, one of the bill’s cosponsors. Rep. Katie Porter, another cosponsor, added that anti-corruption efforts at home can help advance U.S. interests abroad. “Americans know that corruption makes government less representative, less transparent, and less responsive to people’s needs. That’s true everywhere there is government corruption, including in many countries where it poses a threat to our foreign policy and national security goals,” Porter said. Experts say former President Trump’s administration played a crucial role in highlighting the dangers of kleptocracy and raising awareness about corruption. “I think one of the reasons that we’ve seen enormous momentum in Washington is that the U.S. had a very unique experience over the past several years with a president who was so saturated in and benefited significantly from these types of pro-kleptocracy or kleptocratic services,” said Casey Michel, an adjunct fellow at the Hudson Institute's Kleptocracy Initiative and author of the book American Kleptocracy. “Trump was one of the first global leaders to emerge from one of these pro-kleptocracy industries. That is, the American luxury-real-estate industry and its marriage with anonymous shell companies,” Michel added. What’s more, it’s becoming apparent that global kleptocracy affects the lives of the people that Congress members represent. When Ukrainian oligarch Ihor Kolomoisky laundered millions of dollars through real estate in Cleveland, for example, it stymied economic growth in the area, Michel says. “They used all of this looted wealth and bought up commercial real estate, factories, and manufacturing plants that were really the life blood of these small communities, and they left these buildings to rot,” Michel said. “So instead of being a revitalization campaign and bringing jobs back, they are just dead weight.” Meanwhile, the rise of illiberalism and anti-democratic regimes from Hungary to Venezuela has also played a role in calling attention to illicit financial flows, lawmakers argue. “With authoritarianism on a troubling rise around the globe, the United States must do everything humanly possible to root out foreign corruption and kleptocracy—which is the preferred fuel of a tyrant’s rise to, and hold on, power,” said Rep. Emanuel Cleaver. “The Counter-Kleptocracy Act is critical to America’s national security and the defense of democracy-loving nations across the world,” Cleaver added. Sen. Marco Rubio, a member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, also introduced bills included in the Counter-Kleptocracy Act because of concern for rising authoritarianism. “As corrupt regimes worldwide seek to undermine the rule of law, the Justice for Victims of Kleptocracy Act of 2021 represents a step in the right direction in order to hold kleptocrats accountable,” Rubio said, referring to a bill that would create a public Justice Department website documenting the amount of money stolen by corrupt officials in each country and recovered by the U.S. In general, U.S. counter kleptocracy initiatives fall into three categories. Some work to push dirty money out of the U.S. financial system by enforcing beneficial ownership transparency or requiring lawyers, lobbyists, accountants, real estate agents, and other gatekeepers to verify the source of their clients’ income. Advocates say more efforts are needed on this front, including legislation imposing gatekeeper requirements. Other efforts aim to bolster the rule of law and tackle corruption abroad by abolishing tax havens and making it more difficult for corrupt individuals to use anonymous shell companies based in foreign jurisdictions. Another category of anti-corruption efforts, led in large part by the Justice Department and the Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control, include dismantling kleptocratic networks by issuing sanctions, visa bans, or indictments. The legislation in the Counter-Kleptocracy Act focuses largely on these latter efforts. For example, the Foreign Corruption Accountability Act authorizes visa bans on foreign nationals who use state power to engage in acts of corruption and the Revealing and Explaining Visa Exclusions for Accountability and Legitimacy Act enables the executive branch to reveal the names of human-rights abusers and kleptocrats banned from the U.S. Sen. Ben Cardin, who introduced two of the initiatives in the Counter-Kleptocracy Act, noted that the bills have support in the Senate. “I am proud that two of my initiatives, the Combating Global Corruption Act and the Transnational Repression Accountability and Prevention Act, have been included in the Counter-Kleptocracy Act. A third, the Countering Russian and Other Overseas Kleptocracy Act, is also moving in the House. All three bills have momentum in the Senate as well,” Cardin said. “By passing these pieces of legislation, we create the tools and authorities necessary to confront modern dictatorship.” Cohen, who introduced the package, also said he’s counting on his colleagues to back the initiative. “All seven of these bills are bipartisan and they are good bills,” Cohen said. “I don’t know of a single member of Congress who publicly supports corruption or kleptocracy. Does that mean there won’t be pushback? Maybe not. I have been surprised before. But I hope that my colleagues in Congress will recognize how important this bill is and lend their support.”

  • Rodchenkov Anti-Doping Act won't keep Tokyo clean - lawyer

    July 21 (Reuters) - The Rodchenkov Anti-Doping Act (RADA) is essential to restoring integrity to international sports and protecting clean athletes but won't be able to keep the Tokyo Games clean, a Helsinki Commission hearing in Washington was told on Wednesday. RADA, which was signed into law last December, allows the United States to prosecute individuals for doping schemes at international events involving American athletes, sponsors or broadcasters. The July 23-Aug. 8 Tokyo Olympics will be the first major test of this new law named after Grigory Rodchenkov, a former laboratory head who turned whistleblower and helped expose Russia's state-sponsored doping. The RADA bill empowers prosecutors to seek fines of up to $1 million and jail terms of up to 10 years. "Sadly, RADA will not make the Tokyo games clean. They will not be clean, that much I guarantee," Jim Walden, attorney for Rodchenkov, told the hearing. "The first nine years of my career I spent battling organised crime families in New York as a federal prosecutor. As resilient as the Mob proved to be, it pales in comparison to the deeply entrenched corruption in international sports." According to Walden, RADA is essential to restore integrity to international sports and protect clean athletes because "the current system is corrupt, purposefully ineffective, and deeply conflicted". Walden said Congress could super-size RADA's impact if it uses its oversight authority to ensure the FBI and Justice Department have a complete plan and allocate sufficient resources to bring cases. He also said a second imperative would be to withhold funding for the World Anti-Doping Agency until more transparency and Executive Committee comprised primarily of former clean athletes and anti-doping scientists are achieved. Edwin Moses, emeritus chair of the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency (USADA), told the hearing the "win at all costs" culture in sports is alive and well. Moses said the state-sponsored doping of the Russians competing at the 2014 Sochi Olympics was shocking, but even worse was a "lack of repercussions" that he described as a nightmare realized and one that we have not yet woken from. According to Moses, USADA is deeply committed to the effective utilization of RADA and will actively assist putting it in place and demonstrating its success. "This law protects the U.S. financial investment in international competition; stops corrupt actors that organize and facilitate doping fraud; compensates clean athletes who have been defrauded; and protects whistleblowers and clean athletes," said Moses. "The Rodchenkov Act is a strong deterrent to those that look to corrupt sport, on a global scale and ultimately a powerful detection mechanism."

  • The U.S. Midwest Is Foreign Oligarchs’ New Playground

    Forget Manhattan or Monaco; it’s cities like Cleveland that are now attracting ill-gotten money from abroad. For many in the West, the notion of kleptocracy—of transnational money laundering tied to oligarchs and authoritarians bent on washing billions of dollars in dirty money—remains a foreign concept. It conjures images of oligarchs purchasing penthouses in Manhattan or regime insiders floating aboard yachts along the French Riviera or maybe even the children of despots racing luxury cars down the streets of Paris. With pockets bulging with billions of dollars in illicit wealth, it makes a certain sense why these kleptocrats would gravitate toward other deep-pocketed areas. But these kleptocrats are no longer just laundering and parking their dirty money in places like Miami, Malibu, and Monaco. Instead, they’ve begun targeting new areas for their laundering sprees, places few would suspect: from declining, second-tier cities like Cleveland, Ohio, to small factory and steel towns across the American Midwest. In so doing, these kleptocratic figures are no longer simply keeping luxury condos on standby or collecting fleets of private jets and high-end automobiles. Instead, they’re increasingly leaving a trail of destruction in their wake, demolishing the economies of working-class towns and leaving behind empty, sagging downtowns as relics of better times. Take, for instance, the ongoing story of Ukrainian billionaire Ihor Kolomoisky. Recently sanctioned by the United States for his rank corruption, Kolomoisky stands accused by Ukrainian and U.S. authorities of overseeing one of the greatest Ponzi schemes the world has ever seen. Running PrivatBank, one of Ukraine’s leading retail banks, for years, Kolomoisky crafted an image of a successful entrepreneur devoted to Ukraine’s growing middle class. However, not long after Ukraine’s successful anti-authoritarian revolution in 2014, Ukrainian authorities began poking around the ledgers of Kolomoisky’s bank. Their findings were staggering. Ukrainian investigators—led by Valeria Gontareva, then-reformist head of Ukraine’s banking governing body—discovered a $5.5-billion hole in the middle of PrivatBank’s books. The hole forced Kyiv to nationalize the bank, plugging an institution that was too big to fail and sending Kolomoisky on the run. When it came to Ukrainian banks transforming into money laundering machines, “PrivatBank wasn’t an exception,” Gontareva told Foreign Policy. “The problem was that it was the biggest one.” The immediate question was an obvious one: Where had the money gone? As journalists discovered, and as the U.S. Justice Department has alleged in a series of filings in recent months, Kolomoisky didn’t direct the missing billions of dollars into London flats or mansions on the Italian coastline. Instead, as U.S. and Ukrainian investigators discovered, Kolomoisky and a network of enablers plowed much of the money into commercial real estate in places like Cleveland and Louisville, Kentucky—and into small towns reliant on manufacturing plants and steel factories in Illinois, West Virginia, and Michigan. Rather than use the illicit money to play alongside the world’s elite, Kolomoisky and his network allegedly buried their money in the heart of Middle America, using a series of shell companies and cash purchases to obscure their trail. Why would a foreign oligarch decide to hide hundreds of millions of dollars (and potentially more) across overlooked pockets of the United States? Kolomoisky’s example offers three possible motivations. The first reason lies in the obscurity of smalls town like Warren, Ohio, and Harvard, Illinois. Few investigators, journalists, and authorities would have paid any attention to these purchases, let alone asked questions about the source of funds. Unlike places like Seattle, Dallas, or New York City, where the United States now effectively bars anonymous real estate purchases, much of the rest of the country remains perfectly open for the kinds of anonymous real estate purchases at the heart of kleptocratic networks. The second reason appears directly linked to the economic decline of many of these overlooked regions, especially following the Great Recession. For many of these assets, the only buyers are often kleptocrats with deep pockets. In Cleveland, for instance, Kolomoisky’s network of enablers swooped into town when no one else appeared interested, snapping up numerous massive downtown buildings in the post-2008 world. According to a local Cleveland journalist who requested to speak on background, Kolomoisky’s network simply “showed up in Cleveland and started buying when no one else was buying.” Eventually, the oligarch and his team became the biggest commercial real estate holders in the entire city. And that dynamic—with kleptocratic money the only game in town—meant those on the receiving end had no incentive to look this foreign gift horse in the mouth, even when the signs of money laundering were clear. And the ease of entering these markets meant Kolomoisky and his network could do whatever they wanted with these assets—even running them into the ground as they did time and again. Indeed, Kolomoisky never appeared interested in turning a profit for any of these U.S. assets but instead using them simply as something of a kleptocratic nest egg, far away from Ukrainian authorities. According to court documents, Kolomoisky used his U.S. investments simply as nodes in his laundering network, allowing them to slowly fall apart—but not before, in some cases, these assets’ slow-motion collapse sent Americans to the hospital with debilitating injuries. This happened time and again across the American Rust Belt and Midwest. The steel plant in Warren, now shuttered, looks like something out of a dystopian landscape, with cavernous holes gouged in the siding and walls covered in rust—and with all of its former employees now without jobs. A hulking manufacturing plant in the town of Harvard, Illinois—a plant that should have been the economic lifeblood for the town—has been left to rot, with the cash-strapped city left to pick up the tab. (“The building is f—ing cursed,” Michael Kelly, the town’s mayor, told us.) And rather than investments and the dreamed-of revitalization, Cleveland has been left with, as one local paper said, a “gaping hole” in its downtown, courtesy of the investments Kolomoisky and his network let effectively implode. As the local  journalist familiar with the Kolomoisky-linked purchases added, “They pretty much ruined everything they touched.” Over and over again, Kolomoisky and his network allegedly turned to Middle America—overlooked towns, forgotten areas, regions that needed an economic lifeline, whatever the source—for their massive laundering needs. And in so doing, they revealed kleptocrats no longer simply turn to the coasts or the cultural capitals and beach-front areas traditionally associated with modern kleptocracy. Main Street America is now a target for this corrosive, kleptocratic capital, draining these areas of whatever hope or promise remained. “I like to use the analogy of—if you’ve ever lived out in the far West—a dry streambed,” said former FBI agent Karen Greenaway, who’d been involved in tracking transnational money laundering for years, in 2019 congressional testimony at the Helsinki Commission, an independent U.S. federal agency focusing on human rights and pro-democracy policies. “Dirty money is like a rainstorm coming into a dry streambed. It comes very quickly, and a lot of it comes very fast, and the stream fills up, and then it gets dry again.” Yet the sources of illicit wealth—those behind the dirty money flood—aren’t interested in turning their investments into productive, job-creating engines. “What we have is people who don’t live in the United States, who don’t have any intention of really investing in the United States, but they needed a place to put their money,” Greenaway continued. “I think it’s hurting small-town America. I just don’t think that we’ve come to that realization yet.” Thankfully, U.S. legislators are finally starting to propose solutions and beginning to center the kind of kleptocracy embodied by Kolomoisky at the heart of proposed reforms. Although the polarization of Congress is taken for granted these days, counter-kleptocracy efforts remain an important space where Democrats and Republicans continue to agree. As such, a bipartisan slate of legislators will be launching a “Caucus Against Foreign Corruption and Kleptocracy” on June 10, seeking to advance solutions and educate other members on the corrosive effects of kleptocracy, especially as it pertains to its effects on mainstream Americans. The proposed solutions address three primary prongs of counter-kleptocracy efforts. The first of these proposals entails enhancing resiliency at home by building legal and financial systems more resistant to the taint of corruption. Congress took a significant step forward last year by banning anonymous shell company formations, long a favorite tool of kleptocrats moving their money around the West. But it hasn’t stopped there. Congress will soon be debating the Transnational Repression Accountability and Prevention Act, a critical piece of legislation to counter authoritarian regimes increasingly reaching into democratic countries to target dissidents and journalists (such as what we recently saw out of Belarus). Kleptocratic regimes do this via things like Interpol, which is itself regularly abused by these governments and figures to harass and silence dissidents and critics, ensuring their stolen money remains hidden elsewhere. Among other things, this bill would effectively protect the U.S. judicial system from abuse by kleptocrats and would aid U.S. efforts to reform rule-of-law governance mechanisms within Interpol. The second prong of proposed reforms targets kleptocrats directly, including the use of sanctions, visa bans, intelligence networks, and law enforcement authorities to disable individual kleptocrats and ensure they cannot corrode democratic institutions. Congress took another step forward last year with the passage of the Rodchenkov Anti-Doping Act, a rare extraterritorial criminal statute that enables U.S. law enforcement to indict and pursue “doping fraud,” the use of doping regimes to defraud athletes, businesses, and states—a common tactic of authoritarian kleptocracies at international games. Congress is also now set to debate the Foreign Extortion Prevention Act (FEPA). If passed, this bill would serve as a long-awaited complement to the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA). Where the FCPA makes it illegal for a company to pay a bribe abroad, FEPA will make it a crime for a foreign official to demand a bribe. This creates liability for the kleptocrats who extort law-abiding companies. These kleptocrats can then be arrested and tried when they travel to the West to spend and launder their ill-gotten gains. Finally, the third prong centers on building the rule of law abroad, including emphasizing more targeted uses of foreign aid to fight corruption as well as working closely with allies to dismantle the broader offshore economy. For instance, the Countering Russian and Other Overseas Kleptocracy Act, recently introduced in the Senate by Democratic Sen. Ben Cardin and Republican Sen. Roger Wicker, would create an “anti-corruption action fund” that accumulates money via a surcharge on fines from the FCPA. These resources can then be surged into countries undergoing significant democratization movements and reforms (such as Ukraine following its successful 2014 revolution), providing increasing resources for investigators in recipient countries to track how these kleptocrats loot, launder, and stash their ill-gotten gains abroad—including in places like small-town America. A whole host of other ideas are under discussion in Congress, many of which will be spearheaded by the forthcoming “Caucus Against Foreign Corruption and Kleptocracy.” And the ideas can’t come a moment too soon. As the case of Kolomoisky clearly illustrates, kleptocracy and the regimes that benefit are no longer things that simply happen abroad or in elite, coastal enclaves. Until these bills are passed and currently floated ideas are implemented, these kleptocrats will continue to assume they can target any U.S. state, city, or town they’d like—and that they can upend the lives of Americans regardless of profession or political leaning.

  • The Fight Against Corruption Needs Economists

    Combating corruption and kleptocracy has traditionally been an afterthought in U.S. foreign policy: a goal that most policymakers considered laudable but hardly a priority. That attitude is no longer acceptable. In recent years, countries such as China and Russia have “weaponized” corruption, as Philip Zelikow, Eric Edelman, Kristofer Harrison, and Celeste Ward Gventer argued in these pages last year. For the ruling regimes in those countries, they wrote, bribery and graft have “become core instruments of national strategy” through which authoritarian rulers seek to exploit “the relative openness and freedom of democratic countries [that] make them particularly vulnerable to this kind of malign influence.” Strikingly, one particular form of financial aggression—covert foreign money funneled directly into the political processes of democracies—has increased by a factor of ten since 2014. Over roughly the same period of time, American voters have become highly receptive to narratives about corruption, and politicians across the ideological spectrum now routinely allege that the economy is rigged and deride their opponents as crooked and corrupt. Thus, the needs of U.S. foreign policy and domestic politics have neatly aligned to offer a historic opportunity for a sweeping anticorruption campaign that would institutionalize transparency, resilience, and accountability throughout the United States and in the international financial, diplomatic, and legal systems. President Joe Biden, his closest foreign policy advisers, and an increasingly active cohort of lawmakers are intent on carrying out precisely that kind of effort. But there is one big problem: leaders in the Treasury Department and some of the officials running international economic policy in the Biden administration are not fully on board. Their reluctance to focus on corruption could severely hinder the mission, because they control the most powerful tools that Washington can bring to the fight. Follow the Money No American political figure has done more to frame corruption as a national security issue than Biden. As vice president, he led the U.S. fight against graft abroad and publicly warned in 2015 that, for authoritarian states, “corruption is the new tool of foreign policy.” Writing as a presidential candidate in these pages, Biden promised to issue a policy directive enshrining anticorruption as a core national security interest and pledged to “lead efforts internationally to bring transparency to the global financial system” and to “go after illicit tax havens.” Fighting corruption will be a major focus of the Summit for Democracy that Biden pledged to host in his first year in office. The foreign policy specialists who have spent years working with Biden are all in sync on this issue. In his first major speech as secretary of state, Antony Blinken prioritized fighting corruption in the contexts of both economic inclusivity and democratic renewal. Blinken has already bestowed honorary awards on anticorruption activists and banned the most powerful oligarch in Ukraine from entering the United States due to corruption; he is now considering naming an anticorruption special envoy. Samantha Power, who heads the United States Agency for International Development, recently wrote that fighting corruption is crucial to restoring U.S. leadership and pledged that doing so would be “a huge priority” at the agency under her leadership. In his first interview after being named the national security adviser, Jake Sullivan said that combating corruption and kleptocracy is one of his highest goals, and the administration’s interim national security strategic guidance mentions corruption half a dozen times. The leadership at the Treasury Department, however, does not seem nearly as focused on the issue, taking few specific steps to start fighting corruption in the first 100 days of the administration. Until recently, the word “corruption” never appeared in any Treasury speeches, tweets, readouts of calls with foreign officials, or press releases (except for mostly stock language in a few sanctions announcements). In late April, Treasury did release an expression of support for a British anticorruption initiative. But according to one administration official, the White House instructed Treasury to make that statement. When Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen separately addressed international standards against dirty money, rather than calling for a focus on corruption, she emphasized two other priorities: the role of virtual assets such as cryptocurrencies and the financing that enables the proliferation of weapons. At first, Yellen’s inattention to corruption seemed entirely understandable, because she was focused on the public health and economic crises caused by the pandemic. But when she laid out her international agenda in a February letter to the G-20 and in a major speech in April, she did not describe combating corruption and kleptocracy as a priority. Correcting these omissions in a clear and public way should be a top priority for Treasury’s second 100 days. Dirty Money, Dismal Science Mobilizing financial regulations and international diplomacy to wage war on corruption and kleptocracy might not come naturally to economists, even accomplished ones such as Yellen and her staffers, because economics has come to be seen as an academic discipline independent of the realities of state power. That is partly because, during the Cold War, Washington’s strategic goals and its economic interests generally converged: in an ideological competition against communism, the spread of free trade and free markets also naturally advanced the geopolitical campaign to win support for liberal democratic capitalism. Hence there was little need for American economists to pay close attention to strategic considerations, because there was not much tension between purely economic interests and U.S. grand strategy. Since then, however, the nature of authoritarian regimes has evolved, with strategic implications for U.S. policy. Instead of trying to win over the hearts and minds of the masses with communist ideology, the countries that threaten U.S. power today are organized as kleptocracies, stealing from their own people to buy the loyalty of cronies. They hide their ill-gotten gains in Western markets, which presents an Achilles’ heel if financial authorities can manage to find their dirty money. Unfortunately, this new reality has not yet been taken on board by most economists. In many cases, their views have been shaped by a neoliberal consensus that fails to account for the ways in which deregulation and globalization opened pathways to subvert American democracy and reinforce the power of kleptocracies. Meanwhile, policymakers hoping to shift away from neoliberal dogma have generally not included anticorruption as an element of economic policy. The Biden administration’s vision of a “foreign policy for the middle class,” for example, leaves out fighting corruption. Elsewhere, the administration has cast anticorruption efforts as part of its campaign to revitalize democracy rather than as part of its agenda to set international economic policies that can serve all Americans. And when Yellen has described the costs of corruption, she has focused on its negative effects on growth and poverty in other countries rather than the threat it poses to U.S. national security. All Aboard If Biden wants to make progress against corruption, he needs to push his Treasury Department to get with the program. A good first step would be to start preparing a National Corruption Risk Assessment that would expose the financial networks used by oligarchs and kleptocrats. Next month, the department will publish guidance for banks regarding anti–money laundering priorities, and it should use that occasion to emphasize the risks of corruption. And for a broader public audience, a top Treasury official should give a major speech launching a war on corruption, perhaps at the first-ever United Nations session dedicated to corruption, which is scheduled for early June. Treasury should also develop strong regulations for implementing a law that Congress enacted in January that outlaws anonymous shell companies. According to a number of anticorruption experts who maintain contacts in the administration and who have been imploring senior Treasury officials to prioritize this issue, the department was initially reluctant to designate a senior official to serve as a point person for these regulations. Eventually, public pressure from outside critics and private urging from security and economic officials in the White House led to an appointment. Citing funding constraints, however, Treasury has still not hired outside experts to advise it on enforcing the new law, such as civil society advocates who know which regulations to prioritize, what lobbying pushback to expect, and how to close loopholes through seemingly mundane steps such as updating standard forms. Fortunately, lawmakers are ramping up pressure on Treasury to get serious about prioritizing anticorruption. On May 3, Representative Tom Malinowski, Democrat from New Jersey, and Senator Sheldon Whitehouse, Democrat from Rhode Island, wrote a letter to Yellen to “underscore the crucial role of Treasury in combatting international corruption and kleptocracy and to urge you to take early steps to confront this key national security threat.” Malinowski and Whitehouse argued that “the top policy priority in the fight against dirty money should now become the expansion of [anti–money laundering] obligations to cover financial facilitators and professional service providers that can enable corruption.” They recommended first regulating private equity firms and hedge funds before moving on to real estate companies, lawyers, accountants, and others who sometimes enable bribery and graft. They also suggested that Treasury should “lead a landmark international agreement to end offshore financial secrecy and illicit tax havens once and for all . . . backed up by concrete commitments around an array of reporting mechanisms.” Malinowski and Whitehouse also called on Yellen to develop a medium-term anti-kleptocracy plan and appoint anticorruption specialists at Treasury. Meanwhile, the Helsinki Commission—an interagency body created by Congress in 1975 to coordinate security policy with Europe—plans to launch a new “counter-kleptocracy caucus” in June to share perspectives and coordinate efforts across political parties and congressional committees. Congressional attention to this issue is good news. But to live up to Biden’s ambitious vision for fighting corruption, his entire administration needs to match Capitol Hill’s energy. And that means making sure that every department—including Treasury—devotes itself to the effort.

  • Behind new law, the FBI is getting into anti-doping, but not everyone wants the help

    Behind a new law it intends to wield like a “massive hammer,” the FBI is viewing this summer’s Tokyo Olympics as the first opportunity to expand its efforts to probe corruption in sporting events around the world. But given the reception the law received internationally when it was signed in December, the Summer Games instead might test whether U.S. investigators can expect cooperation or resistance from their global counterparts. The Rodchenkov Anti-Doping Act gives American prosecutors the ability to pursue anyone who conspires to cheat in major sporting events. Even before the law passed, Joseph Gillespie, the FBI’s unit chief overseeing transnational threats, launched the Sport and Gaming Initiative, focusing more attention and resources on investigating sports-specific crimes. He said investigators have met with Department of Justice officials and begun outreach with foreign law enforcement agencies and sports organizations to discuss ways to better police sports internationally. “We have this massive tool where it’s a codified thing that we can use to go after people,” Gillespie said. “You see lots of legislation come in, and sometimes it’s very loose and vague and not very expansive. This particular one, because of the elements, their definition of a major international sports competition, it’s quite expansive.” Born out of the Russia doping scandal, the law easily passed through Congress last year. But some international sports officials felt the United States was granting itself gratuitous powers, expanding its jurisdiction to any international sports event that includes an American athlete, is broadcast in the United States or features a sponsor that does business in the United States. The World Anti-Doping Agency railed against the bill, warning jurisdictional issues will complicate and undermine existing anti-doping efforts. The Tokyo Olympics could provide the first glimpse of how the law might be implemented, revealing the willingness of U.S. authorities to apply it, the level of cooperation they’ll receive from outside agencies and the hurdles inherent with enforcing extraterritorial laws. “These types of laws are helpful in terms of creating some kind of definition of the crimes. But their bark is often way worse than their bite,” said Mark A. Drumbl, director of the Transnational Law Institute at the Washington and Lee School of Law. “You can’t bring a case if you don’t have evidence. Without the transfer of people, information, witnesses, it leads to nothing.” The bill’s namesake, Grigory Rodchenkov, the whistleblower who helped expose the depths of the Russian scandal, said it will be needed in Tokyo, where Russia has been formally barred but dozens of Russian athletes will be allowed to compete as “neutral athletes from Russia.” In an email to The Washington Post, he said Russians “keep using doping as a weapon to test whether the international community will ever hold them to account.” “The Rodchenkov Act is now the ‘doping sword of Damocles’ hanging over the heads of the doping orchestrators who know that sooner or later they will be punished,” he said. “I do firmly believe that this law, and the U.S. Department of Justice and FBI, will bring a new day of real change, deterrence and justice to world sport.” ‘Absolutely inevitable’ Unique in the sports world, the Rodchenkov Act could be similar in practice to other extraterritorial laws, such as the RICO Act. The law equates doping with a form of fraud, victimizing athletes, sponsors and audiences who expect clean and fair competition. While the courts have helped define the reach and limits of other transnational laws, Congress tried to make the scope and reach of the Rodchenkov Act immediately clear. Paul Massaro, a policy adviser for the Helsinki Commission and a key architect of the legislation, has a background in anti-corruption, finance and trade and wanted a law that was practical and gave authorities proper guidance. In other sports-related cases — the FIFA investigation, for example — prosecutors have had to hunt for applicable pieces of the RICO and Travel acts. This law codifies the anti-doping crimes. “It is the real deal,” Massaro said. “It has real teeth, and we expect real enforcement. We expect real deterrence, and we have the capacity to do so. We’ve seen exactly this happen with all sorts of extraterritorial criminal law.” Massaro and Rodchenkov appeared this week on the “Helsinki on the Hill” podcast, one of the rare times Rodchenkov, the former head of Russia’s national anti-doping laboratory who now lives incognito in the United States, has spoken publicly. In the interview, he likened doping to a cancer that has metastasized over several years and said the world has “no remedy, no tool, no cannon or rifle to kill everything at once.” “Look, why Rodchenkov Act was inevitable? Because sport corruption and crime, they have close-link relations,” he said. “And if you take a helicopter view, what would we have in sport, we have several issues. It’s betting/gambling, sexism and doping. The first two issues, there are criminal laws and criminal things. So it was absolutely inevitable to bring criminal law enforcement into sport.” Passing a law and enforcing one are different matters. Extraterritorial criminal laws require cooperation at almost every level, Drumbl said, and even if the U.S. law is clearly defined, American authorities might need foreign support to vigorously pursue investigations. “Without the cooperation of other states — if the harm occurred somewhere else, if the information you need is somewhere else, if the wrongdoers are somewhere else — it’s just going to be hard in a practical, logistical sense to bring a case,” he said. “You need a lot of cooperation for this to work in a legal system. That’s the stuff that law makes more complicated. It’s not just politics. You’ve got to adhere to a whole set of standards.” Gillespie, too, says the FBI has had lengthy discussions with entities such as Interpol and the Council of Europe’s Network of National Platforms, in which more than 30 countries work together to probe sports competition. Known as the Group of Copenhagen, the multinational entity has relationships with organizations such as FIFA and the International Olympic Committee, and the FBI was among the agencies on-site at the 2019 Women’s World Cup, aiding real-time investigative efforts. “We need to increase our rapport and cooperation with the sporting organizations, those integrity elements,” Gillespie said. “And so to a certain extent, we have to kind of drop the FIFA in the past. That happened. We’re done. We’re not coming at you. We want to work with you to make sure that doesn’t happen within those organizations.” It’s not clear how much international sports organizations will welcome American authorities. WADA met with U.S. lawmakers last year to point out what it sees as problems with the legislation, and a spokesman said the organization’s position has not changed. “WADA as well as several governments and international sports organizations remain concerned that the Act could have a number of negative unintended consequences for the fight against doping in sport around the world,” WADA’s James Fitzgerald said in an email. “WADA continues to be ready and willing to assist the U.S. authorities in devising how best to implement the positive aspects of the Act without destabilizing the harmonized global anti-doping system.” Massaro said U.S. authorities won’t necessarily need the aid of organizations such as WADA to bring charges against bad actors. He notes that the Russian scandal unfolded under the watch of WADA and the IOC yet Russian athletes are still allowed to compete internationally. “The necessity will be minimal,” he said, “and honestly, in my opinion, it should be kept to a minimum. These organization are compromised, and they are part of the problem.” A test in Tokyo The FBI has been active in sports investigations in the past, but in establishing the Sport and Gaming Initiative last year, Gillespie said the agency was realigning resources, educating field offices and firming up relationships with sports organizations. In addition to international doping, he said, the FBI will have an interest in potential match-fixing and gambling-related crimes. He added the college sports arena could be especially vulnerable to corruption. He wants domestic and international leagues to know the FBI intends to be active in this space and hopes the network of extraterritorial laws discourages wrongdoers. He said the Justice Department’s Organized Crime and Gang Section has indicated an interest in pursuing cases built off the Rodchenkov Act. Justice Department officials did not respond to requests to comment. “Obviously, the application of it will be key,” Gillespie said of the new law. “The first couple of cases that come under it are going to be very key for setting a precedent on the interpretation of it.” It’s not clear what the FBI presence might be at the Tokyo Games. At the Women’s World Cup, the Group of Copenhagen operated a mini command post, which included the FBI and other agencies, and Gillespie said, “We want to see if we can apply that towards the Olympics and these other major institutions. “We feel that it would be a good selling point for the International Olympic Committee for them to advertise that there’s an integrity element as part of those Games,” he said. “… We’ll have to present that under the international umbrella because they may be fearful of us coming at them directly.” With competition schedules scuttled and training upended during the coronavirus pandemic, drug testing has been inconsistent throughout the sports world for more than a year, ramping up fears that the Tokyo Games will be ripe for abuse. Massaro said these Olympics amount to a “very, very serious test” and everyone will be looking to see if the United States is serious about assuming a role as a global watchdog. “If Russia is going to test the waters and do in Tokyo what they’re doing in Ukraine right now — testing the Biden administration by heating up conflict — they’ll want to test it in Tokyo, and we’ll have to be ready to push back with this law,” Massaro said.

  • It's time to abolish the federal death penalty

    In July 2020, the Trump administration ended a 17-year moratorium on the federal death penalty. By the time the president exited the White House on Jan. 20, 2021, 13 inmates had died at the hands of a federal executioner in the span of just six months. There are many reasons to end the federal death penalty. It does not serve as an effective deterrent to violent crime, capital cases are expensive to litigate, like our larger judicial system, it is rife with racial inequity and once it is rendered, it is irrevocable, no matter how unjust. Perhaps most importantly, the United States has publicly and repeatedly committed to preserving human rights and fundamental freedoms for all people, through our membership in the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe and elsewhere. The death penalty simply cannot be reconciled with these promises to value and protect democracy, the rule of law and impartial justice. By eliminating the federal death penalty, Congress can demonstrate that the United States is once again a nation that lives up to our values and our promises to make the world better and lead by example — an opportunity met with derision by the last administration. No other human rights concern is raised more consistently with the United States by our European allies than the death penalty, which our closest friends compare to torture. According to the European Union, the death penalty is “the ultimate cruel, inhuman and degrading punishment.” Nearly every other country in the OSCE region — even Russia and Turkey — has repealed or established moratoria on capital punishment. Among the OSCE’s 57 participating States, only two still impose a judicial sanction of death: the United States and Belarus. Outside the OSCE region, our company among those that impose the death penalty is no better. According to Amnesty International, the world’s leading executioners include China and Iran. U.S. allies like Australia and South Korea have rejected the death penalty. The values gap between America and our allies has consequences. For example, other NATO members will not send criminal suspects here if they face capital punishment. Last October, the United States secured the long-sought extradition from Britain of two alleged ISIS terrorists only once the U.S. Department of Justice finally agreed not to pursue a sentence of death. Ending the death penalty should be part of comprehensive justice reform in the United States and part of our current reckoning with racial inequality. More than half of the states across our nation have abolished the death penalty or halted executions. Most recently, Virginia legislators voted in February to end the death penalty. Upon introducing the legislation, Gov. Ralph Northam noted racial disparities and cited the case of Earl Washington, a man who came nine days away from being executed but was cleared by DNA evidence not available at his trial. Washington was eventually pardoned by then-Gov. Jim Gilmore — most recently the U.S. Ambassador to the OSCE — who saved an innocent man from irreparable injustice. Now it is time for Congress to end the death penalty at the federal level. Rep. Alcee L. Hastings chaired the U.S. Commission on Security and Cooperation in Europe in the 116th Congress and is a cosponsor of H.R. 262, the Federal Death Penalty Prohibition Act. From 2004 to 2006, Rep. Hastings served as president of the OSCE Parliamentary Assembly.

  • Corruption Is a National Security Threat. The CROOK Act Is a Smart Way to Fight It.

    Not long ago, America’s greatest adversaries were bound together by communist ideology. Today, they most often are defined by political corruption—authoritarian leaders using the levers of government to enrich themselves and ward off political opponents. Corrupt leaders cling to power through patronage networks and exploit rule-of-law jurisdictions, like the United States, to conceal and protect their stolen assets. These leaders are also accustomed to using strategic corruption as a tool of foreign policy. Corruption has its most perverse effects on the people who are forced to live under it. Corruption undermines democracy, hollows out the rule of law, and prevents the efficient and fair delivery of government services, as evidenced in the scandals affecting certain pandemic response efforts. Corruption also fuels the rise of authoritarian opportunists who seek to exploit social divisions, restrict freedom, and use public office for personal gain. Corruption also poses a wider threat to American democracy and prosperity, and to the prosperity of our allies. Almost every major transnational threat—such as human trafficking, black markets, and terrorism—is inextricably linked to corruption. Slowly but surely, the fight against corruption is gaining momentum worldwide. In Russia, corruption exposed by activist Alexei Navalny has sparked mass protests against a political elite that systematically steals from them. In the past three years alone, outrage against corruption has fueled protests in 32 countries. Despite these encouraging signs, opportunities to root out corruption remain rare—and when they arise, the window for action closes quickly. To have maximum impact in this fight, the United States needs to be ready to assist anti-corruption reformers on short notice. Seizing Opportunities for Reform The United States currently spends about $115 million a year on global anti-corruption programs. To put this in perspective, we spend $9.5 billion annually on global health assistance programs. Unfortunately, many of the funds we put toward anti-corruption efforts get trapped in multi-year technical programs that are unable to respond nimbly to sudden opportunities for governance reform. Scholars and practitioners have demonstrated that rapid action is crucial to making corruption reforms stick. When the rare window for reform opens, reformers must act quickly and boldly to capitalize on public momentum and prevent old-guard cronies from reasserting their influence. If the United States does not compete in these environments, fledging reformers will have an even harder time succeeding, and authoritarian kleptocrats will gain ground. The United States needs to be proactive in developing strategic relationships and agile programs that will keep us relevant in moments of historic opportunity. Last month, we introduced the Countering Russian and Other Overseas Kleptocracy (CROOK) Act to upgrade America’s anti-corruption efforts by targeting kleptocracy at the source. The CROOK Act would create an anti-corruption action fund to help activists leverage public sentiment to achieve lasting reform, without any additional cost to taxpayers. The fund would be financed through a $5 million surcharge on entities found liable for $50 million or more in criminal fines and penalties under the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA). Based on data from the last 10 years, this bill would put an additional $16 million per year toward global anti-corruption work. Funds would continue to accrue until a historic window of opportunity opens, at which point funds would be rapidly deployed to help establish the rule of law. Imagine if the United States had been able to inject more anti-corruption resources into Ukraine after the Revolution of Dignity in 2014, or Armenia after the 2018 Velvet Revolution, or Malaysia after its 2018 election. If the United States had been ready with an anti-corruption action fund, we could have dramatically amplified the work of courageous reformers to establish lasting change, and ultimately make the United States more secure. Leveraging FCPA fines and penalties to fight global anti-corruption is a long-overdue shift. The FCPA, passed in 1973, makes it illegal for a U.S. business to pay a bribe abroad and collects enormous fines and penalties every year—often in the billions of dollars. Yet historically, these fines have gone exclusively to the U.S. Treasury rather than being recycled into anti-corruption efforts. On issues like human trafficking and child pornography, the U.S. government already uses some money collected from perpetrators to aid victims and help fight the crimes committed against them. It is time for a similar approach to fighting corruption.  Enhancing FCPA Enforcement The FCPA represents America’s commitment never to export corruption abroad. This draws a stark contrast with kleptocratic powers like China, a nation that exports corruption skillfully and aggressively through its Belt and Road Initiative. Regrettably, vigorous enforcement of the FCPA—though fully legal—has been a sticking point with some allies, who falsely claim it is a means to line American pockets. The CROOK Act would undercut these claims by redirecting a portion of fines and penalties collected to help U.S. partners fight corruption. The CROOK Act would also rebut a longstanding critique of the FCPA: that the U.S. unfairly targets private companies for offering bribes rather than targeting the source of demand for those bribes among foreign officials. The CROOK Act would create a more holistic approach by helping establish rule-of-law structures that would restrain officials from seeking bribes, resulting in a more level playing field for American businesses. The world’s most prominent anti-corruption advocates have all endorsed the CROOK Act, including Transparency International USA and the Financial Accountability and Corporate Transparency (FACT) Coalition. Like much of the legislation that has emerged from the U.S. Helsinki Commission on which we serve, this bill enjoys bipartisan support in both the House and the Senate. Fighting corruption is an imperative for the United States. As a beacon of liberty and the rule of law, it is our duty and the purest expression of our values. It is also a highly practical form of soft power that advances our national security. Allocating the right resources for this fight is a small price to pay for advancing good governance abroad and creating a more stable world. Passing the CROOK Act would be decisive step in the right direction.

  • A Transatlantic Plan for Racial Equity and Justice

    From the United States to Germany, and Canada to Poland, the killing of George Floyd by a white Minnesota police officer has galvanized a transatlantic movement for human rights and social justice. Activists have managed to sustain their cumulative mobilization in honor of countless lives, most recently in outcries following the September grand jury acquittal of officers involved in the killing of Breonna Taylor, who had been sleeping when they broke down her door with a battering ram to execute a no-knock warrant. Most Western countries have not seen mobilization on this scale or of this scope in several decades, yet organizations, businesses, and institutions continue to debate how best to meaningfully respond. Demands for action have been innumerable, yet national responses have been limited and, in many cases, insufficient in scope to secure and stabilize communities. This is a moment for nations and alliances to consider their responsibilities in the underlying systems that have yielded inequitable outcomes and less security for the most marginalized than for their better-off peers. On Sept. 22, the U.S. Congress and the European Parliament convened a joint meeting and advanced toward a transatlantic response to systemic racism. The United States and other Western democracies are grappling with their shared inheritance of persistent practices that date back to when race-based discrimination was enshrined in laws—when Black people were legally and morally deemed to be no more than expendable property. The cumulative weight of generations of such treatment — in culture, in politics, and in the economic system — has led to radically unequal and inequitable societies and set the stage for international protests against racial inequality and injustice. The November 2020 elections in the United States will have a substantial impact on the ability of democratic countries to address their failure to ensure the same rights, protections, and opportunities for all their populations because of enduring institutional and systemic racism. If the discriminatory impacts of colonialism and the transatlantic slave trade endure in the systemic treatment of impacted populations, only meaningful multilateral and transatlantic engagement that empowers the descendants of the colonized and enslaved will meet the demands of demonstrators pouring into streets across the globe. The next U.S. presidential administration should seek national and international political commitments by its allies, alliances, and international organizations, coupled with investment commensurate with the insidious scope of the hate we seek to overcome. The Need for a Transatlantic Response World War II brought about global carnage that demanded sophisticated international cooperation towards economic recovery. The Economic Recovery Act of 1948, proposed by U.S. Secretary of State George Marshall and passed by the U.S. Congress, resulted in more than $13 billion invested in the reconstruction of Europe. This investment was critical in Europe’s recovery, in cementing ties between Western democracies, and in obstructing the westward spread of Communism. This moment again calls for a similarly substantial investment in the reconstruction of economies, but this time the economic objective is genuinely transatlantic and the scourge that must be confronted is one with deep historic roots. The COVID-19 pandemic may have accelerated the inevitability of such a policy. As the coronavirus lays waste to economies on both sides of the Atlantic, it exacerbates the inequities of systemic racism. Research has shown that socially disadvantaged communities, including those impacted by systemic racism, are more susceptible and vulnerable to the consequences of the pandemic. National responses to the pandemic have already outweighed the scale of the Marshall Plan, yet sufficient attention has not been given to how this moment can be seized to rebuild our societies and economies with inclusive policies that make our communities more resilient, even as they make them more equitable. Now is the time for the United States to forge transatlantic agreements with the United Kingdom and the European Union, to address racism at the scope and scale of the historic Marshall Plan. What Would a Transatlantic Plan to Address Racism Look Like? Over the last decade, the United States has established a range of bilateral agreements in the Western Hemisphere to advance social inclusion for racial and ethnic equality. Joint action plans and memoranda of understanding with Brazil, Colombia, and Uruguay have fostered everything from academic exchanges with Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) to public- and private-sector solutions for racial health disparities, access to education, and equal access to the justice system. Why don’t similar agreements exist to advance these objectives in a transatlantic context? Members of Congress and parliamentarians in Europe have advocated for just that since the 2009 Black European Summit at the European Parliament and in subsequent transatlantic exchanges. A joint declaration last month from members of the European Parliament and the U.S. Congress emphasized the role of the recently established European Union (EU) Commission Anti-Racism Coordinator to facilitate the adoption of national action plans for EU Member States and the United States. Such national action plans, due by 2022, would reinforce a much-needed EU-U.S. Joint Action Plan on Racial and Ethnic Equality and Inclusion that could be negotiated by the next U.S. presidential administration. Momentum is building for multilateral and bilateral agreements, to draw from and build on the global racial justice movement. Potential opportunities are already before us. A future U.S.-U.K. Free Trade Agreement following Brexit, for example, should include incentives for economic empowerment of British and American communities marginalized by systemic racism. The British Parliament and the U.S. Congress should be required, as part of any such agreement, to conduct regular equality impact assessments for populations affected by said agreement. Both legislative chambers could turn to relevant legislation. They could be guided by relevant U.K. legislation, such as the Equality Act 2010, in order to provide metrics against which any such agreement could be measured. In addition to annual metrics, however, both nations also should measure the realization of long-term goals to empower and uplift marginalized communities. In terms of opportunities within the EU, the European Commission’s Action Plan on Racism released at the end of September should incorporate multilateral considerations. The plan calls for a robust role for public-private partnerships of EU Institutions and member States with civil society in convening a summit against racism in Spring 2021. The summit would produce a commitment to develop joint action plans with the United States, the United Kingdom, and other nations implicated in the enduring legacy of colonialism and the transatlantic slave trade. Notably, the plan also calls for a consistent approach to collecting data on equality, which has long been a contentious issue among EU member States since World War II. Throughout much of the 20th century, many European nations argued against disaggregated ethnic data collection for fear it would be used by ethnic majorities to enact hateful policies. Marginalized groups, however, have advocated for such data collection for decades to inform policy and determine benefits that could rectify the legacy of colonialism and the transatlantic slave trade. Without such data, there are few means to disabuse electorates in Europe of false narratives and assumptions about the role and history of ethnic and racial minorities in Europe. The new plan must navigate this historical context and catalyze more investment in the impact of the EU Agency for Fundamental Rights (FRA). This should include any efforts to implement the related demands of the European Parliament. Any exploration of new trade negotiations between the United States and the European Union should include measures to empower minority and women-owned small and medium-sized enterprises and economic incentives intended to dismantle institutional racism. Inequities Highlighted by the Coronavirus Global protests for racial justice were no doubt intensified by the systemic inequities revealed and compounded by the coronavirus. At the same time, the pandemic has precipitated governmental reinvestment in national economies, demonstrating that governments can indeed execute large-scale strategies to improve and safeguard their democracies when the political will exists. It should be evident in our bilateral and multilateral agreements that anything less than full inclusion for all inhabitants of our nations results in vulnerabilities that leave us all less secure. Given the shared history of slavery, racism, institutional prejudice, and systemic inequity across the Atlantic, it follows that we should seize this moment to begin to conceive of transnational mechanisms to address the sordid legacy of grave social injustice, and deploy our economic resources and capacities to healing a wound that is now centuries old. (Editor’s note: Readers also might be interested in Just Security’s series Racing National Security.)

  • What’s Washington’s role in Belarus?

    The United States should lift up Belarusian civil society, according to experts, and slap tougher sanctions on mid-level government officials abusing protestors. The Trump administration should widen sanctions against human-rights abusers in Belarus and ramp up support for civil-society groups monitoring president Alexander Lukashenko’s crackdown, according to former State and Treasury department officials. Lukashenko purged his political opponents from the ballot in mid-August and unleashed security forces against civilians protesting the election. The crackdown has not cowed Lukashenko’s opponents, who have called for his ouster every weekend for the past two months. Over 100,000 people protested in Minsk on Sunday. The United States penalized senior members of Lukashenko’s inner-circle last week in an effort to push the embattled leader to negotiate. The State Department announced in September that the United States no longer recognizes Lukashenko’s government, and coordinated the sanctions with wider penalties from Europe. Both the Trump administration and European Union officials could be doing more to support the protestors, experts told National Journal. “I think both the U.S. and the EU need to go much further than they have so far, in terms of the number of people that they sanction,” said Michael Carpenter, director at the Penn Biden Center, who called for sanctions against “mid-level” Belarusian officials directly responsible for the human-rights abuses. Belarus-specific sanctions date to the Belarus Democracy Act of 2004, and a Bush-era executive order that sets out guidelines for penalizing officials responsible for undermining democracy. Lawmakers added further penalties in 2011. The Trump administration targeted eight people Friday, including the head of Belarus’s elections and the chief of Belarus’s security forces, and the European Union sanctioned 40 people. The United Kingdom and Canada also announced sanctions over the weekend, including against Lukashenko himself. The sanctions are only one part of Belarus policy, experts stressed, which is ultimately supposed to push Lukashenko to negotiate. Exiled opposition leader Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya asked German Chancellor Angela Merkel to mediate the negotiations on Tuesday. Judy Dempsey, a nonresident senior fellow at Carnegie Europe, predicted that Merkel would take up the challenge—but would have to act quickly. Russian President Vladimir Putin might accuse the EU of meddling in Belarus’ government should the talks drag, Dempsey told National Journal. “If Merkel does take on this mediating role, it’s got to be incredibly sophisticated and it’s got to be very fast,” said Dempsey. The United States may not play a direct role in mediating the talks, but the Trump administration might put more pressure on Lukashenko by targeting mid-level officials inside his government. Former State Department sanctions coordinator Daniel Fried told National Journal that the State Department and OFAC could craft an executive order to authorize “status-based” penalties: those which authorize Treasury to target specific people based on their employment. Officials could then work with Belarusian civil society to identify targets, like “the plainclothes cops roughing up dissidents.” “Putting this into legislation is hard as hell, and then it’s not as flexible,” said Fried. “It’s far better to let OFAC do it, in coordination with the State Department.” Lawmakers have remained largely hands-off on Belarus, besides offering statements in support of those protesting against Lukashenko. In July, the Senate passed a resolution condemning the arrest of opposition candidates and political protesters. The chair and ranking member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee separately called out Lukashenko’s handling of the election in early August, and later in the month issued a joint statement calling for sanctions against those responsible for human-rights abuses. The upper chamber might support Belarus policy by advancing Trump’s ambassadorial nominee to Belarus, several former officials and experts told National Journal. The United States and Belarus haven’t exchanged ambassadors since 2008. The Senate Foreign Relations Committee advanced career State Department official Julie Fisher favorably out of committee in late September. Democratic Sen. Chris Murphy voted against the nomination, and argued that sending the ambassador to Belarus during the crackdown would reward Lukashenko. Some experts disagreed, and said having an ambassador in Minsk could help the United States coordinate policy with civil-society groups and would send an important signal to domestic opposition. Sen. James Risch told Murphy that the State Department believed having an ambassador to Minsk was “the best way to help the Belarusian people.” Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell’s office did not respond to emailed questions about Fisher’s nomination; Senate Foreign Relations Committee spokesperson Suzanne Wrasse told National Journal that McConnell has “a number of priorities,” and that ambassadorial nominations were “on the list.” While former officials agreed that ramping up support for civil society groups and sanctioning mid-level Belarusian officials could be effective at prodding Lukashenko to negotiate, they disagreed over whether also to target large state-owned firms that form the backbone of the Belarusian economy. Carpenter, Fried, and other former Obama administration officials suggested that penalizing the companies could end up hurting protestors, many of whom work on the factory floors. The Lukashenko government has close ties with heavy industry, however, and a few lawmakers told National Journal they support lifting waivers granting them access to the U.S. market. Rep. Alcee Hastings asked Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin in mid-August to cancel sanctions waivers for several Belarusian companies. Hastings led the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe election-monitoring mission for Belarus’s 2006 presidential election, and now heads the Helsinki Commission, a congressionally-created agency that coordinates OSCE policy on Capitol Hill. The Treasury Department has not responded to Hastings’ letter. “Providing support to the Lukashenko regime by allowing its state-owned companies access to our financial system is unacceptable, and the sanctions announced on individuals last week by the Treasury Department are a step in the right direction,” said Hastings in a statement to National Journal. “However, Lukashenko himself has long been a prime candidate for Global Magnitsky sanctions, and failing to include him among the sanctioned individuals is a severe oversight.” Last fall, the state-owned Belarusian oil company Belneftekhim retained lobbyist David Gencarelli to push for the continuation of a licensing exemption allowing the company to purchase “crude oil with delivery to the refineries in the Republic of Belarus.” The Treasury Department extended relief to Belneftekhim and other heavy-industry players, giving them continued access to the American market until April 2021. “What we’ve seen over the years with Lukashenko is he’s a very skillful player juggling between the U.S. and Europe, which is a natural market for Belarus, and Russia,” said Sofya Orlosky, senior program manager for Europe and Eurasia at Freedom House. The EU has similarly sought to keep Lukashenko from sliding into Putin’s orbit, periodically lifting and reimposing sanctions on his government for human-rights abuses. The bloc suspended financial penalties in 2016 after Lukashenko granted “amnesty” to a number of political prisoners, which Orlosky said normalized Lukashenko’s undemocratic behavior. “There’s been, as it were, a limit to the severity of sanctions in the past, because the argument was made at least implicitly that we don’t want to alienate Belarus too much or throw them into Russia’s arms,” said Nigel Gould-Davies, a former British ambassador to Belarus. The Trump administration has pursued normalization with Minsk for the past several years, prior to Lukashenko’s crackdown. The State Department’s top political official, David Hale, met with Lukashenko in Minsk in September 2019, and stated afterward that the U.S. was ready to exchange ambassadors “as the next step in normalizing our relationship.” Secretary of State Mike Pompeo visited Minsk in February for the same purpose. The difference now, according to Gould-Davies: The legitimacy of Lukashenko’s regime “is basically broken.” Very few people support the government, aside from people working directly for the state, which undercuts calls for moderation in the West. “He enjoys no significant support outside of those who actually work for the state,” said Gould-Davies.

  • U.S., EU Sanction Belarus in Coordinated Western Action

    Lukashenko government lashes out, saying no ‘self-respecting’ state would agree to demands posed by the West. The U.S. and European Union imposed sanctions against Belarus officials on Friday, part of a coordinated effort by Western allies to censure the authoritarian regime over accusations of political repression and rigging elections. The EU reached an early morning deal to advance a sanctions package against more than three dozen Belarusian individuals deemed responsible for suppressing protests and for election fraud. Hours later, the U.S. Treasury Department blacklisted eight senior figures in longtime President Alexander Lukashenko’s government or associated with his rule. Among those blacklisted were Interior Minister Yuriy Khadzymuratavich Kareau and top election commission officials. The EU’s action against Belarus, together with a joint statement reprimanding Turkey for drilling in waters claimed by Cyprus and Greece, was meant as a broader message of mounting concern that Europe’s eastern periphery, a region that once held hopes for a spread of democracy, is increasingly turning back to its authoritarian past. Divisions within the EU stymied an attempt to sanction Turkey during a summit this week, but officials said the bloc could approve punitive actions in the future. The EU was able to move forward with its Belarus sanctions package, originally promised in August, after Greece and Cyprus secured the statement calling for Turkey to halt its drilling. While the U.S. sanctioned Mr. Lukashenko in 2006, the EU declined for now to include the Belarussian leader himself in their action. Officials said the president, who previously was the subject of EU sanctions that were lifted in 2016, still could be targeted again later. The EU sanctions came into effect Friday afternoon. Mr Lukashenko’s interior minister was also one of the highest-profile names on the EU sanctions list. The Belarus foreign ministry condemned the sanctions and said the government also enacted its own sanctions list, which won’t be made public. It said it may also reconsider its participation in joint programs with the EU and could cut diplomatic ties if further EU sanctions are levied. “The sanctions were introduced as a punitive measure…for the fact that Belarus did not comply with a set of ultimatum requirements that no self-respecting sovereign state would satisfy,” the foreign ministry said in a statement. The statement didn’t address the specific allegations of election-rigging and violent political repression. The U.S. and EU sanctions follow the imposition of sanctions on Mr. Lukashenko and seven senior figures in his government by the U.K. and Canada on Tuesday, a sign of widening discontent in the West over ongoing repression of peaceful protests against his purported victory in a disputed election. Western officials have accused Mr. Lukashenko and his allies of multiple human rights violations in detaining and allegedly torturing protesters following the Aug. 9 vote, which Mr. Lukashenko’s opponents and Western governments say was rigged in his favor to extend his more than a quarter-century in power. The EU has called for a rerun of the presidential elections with international supervision. It has warned it could add additional sanctions if Mr. Lukashenko refuses to enter dialogue with the opposition. The U.S. sanctions targeted officials the Treasury Department said run government offices responsible for the political repression, human rights abuses and election fixing. Besides the top two Interior Ministry officials, the Treasury also blacklisted the two leaders of Interior’s Internal Troops, Yuriy Henadzievich Nazaranka and Khazalbek Bakhtsibekavich Atabekau. “The Belarusian people’s democratic aspirations to choose their own leaders and peacefully exercise their rights have been met with violence and oppression from Belarusian officials,” said Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin. The Trump administration declined for now to revoke a special license giving the nine largest state-owned companies in Belarus access to the U.S. financial system, as urged by the U.S. Commission on Security and Cooperation in Europe, a government body that advises administrations on sanctions. While the EU’s Belarus sanctions had broad support, the bloc has been deeply split over how to respond to Turkey’s increasingly frequent flexing of military muscle in the region, including its unilateral moves to explore and drill for energy resources in the eastern Mediterranean. Turkey says it has the right to seek energy resources in the region. With respect to Turkey, the EU leaders settled on diplomacy for now, issuing the joint statement but threatening sanctions if Ankara didn’t show willingness to improve ties. Western diplomats said tensions between Ankara and Athens this summer rose to levels not seen since the 1970s, when Turkey and Greece came close to a direct military conflict over Cyprus. Greece and Turkey are North Atlantic Treaty Organization members. However, Turkey has for now suspended its energy activities in waters claimed by Greece but not by Cyprus. Separately, Turkey and Greece reached an agreement Thursday, mediated by NATO, to take measures to avoid an air or naval clash in the eastern Mediterranean, including a hotline between the two countries. European diplomats have also grown alarmed by Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s decision to send troops into Libya and Syria, its unconditional support for Azerbaijan in renewed fighting with Armenia and its acquisition of advanced weaponry from Russia. On Thursday, French President Emmanuel Macron said France had clear evidence that jihadist fighters were leaving Syria to go to fight in Nagorno-Karabakh via Turkey. Mr. Macron had earlier criticized Ankara for what he called its bellicose comments against Armenia over its conflict with Azerbaijan. —Ann Simmons in Moscow contributed to this article.

  • The OSCE: A Bulwark Against Authoritarianism

    As we mark the 45th anniversary of the 1975 signing of the Helsinki Final Act, the founding document of today’s Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE), the ideals of democracy that had been advanced by that pact—freedom of speech, freedom of religion, and civil liberties—are under threat. In 1975, Soviet totalitarianism was the great threat to human rights and fundamental freedoms; today, authoritarianism poses a growing threat to human dignity and rights in the region. Authoritarianism is a fact of life in much of Eurasia, a reflection of the actual worldwide tension between countries defending universal human rights obligations and countries attempting to undermine trust in democratic institutions and promote an authoritarian model. This is true not only in repressive nations like Russia; even among some U.S. partner countries, there are warning signs. Some nations have also taken it upon themselves to block vital leadership roles in international institutions during a global pandemic unlike anything we have seen in a century. The ultimate outcome of this conflict is up to us. Liberty and human rights will prevail, but only if freedom-loving people everywhere join together to defend and preserve human rights and fundamental freedoms for all. Many international institutions dedicated to freedom and human rights were founded with U.S. support in the wake of World War II, in which more than a million U.S. citizens were either killed or wounded and trillions of dollars spent on the effort to defeat fascism. Democratic ideals are ingrained in the founding charters that established those organizations. For nearly 75 years, such institutions have consistently served as a bulwark against totalitarianism, communism, terrorism, and other forms of tyranny; limited conflict among nations; helped raise millions out of poverty; and spread democratic values throughout the world. The OSCE grew out of the Helsinki Final Act, a 1975 political agreement among the United States, Canada, the Soviet Union, and other European nations. Signed by both democratic and communist regimes, the Final Act acknowledged openly that respect for human rights within states is crucial to security among states, and that human rights concerns could legitimately be raised among signatories. Today, the OSCE is the world’s largest regional security organization, encompassing 57 countries in Europe, as well as the United States and Canada.  It includes Russia, Ukraine, and many other successors of the former Soviet Union, reaching as far east as Central Asia and Mongolia, and north beyond the Arctic Circle. The phrase “Vancouver to Vladivostok” accurately describes the organization’s reach. With its “comprehensive concept of security,” the OSCE addresses military security, economic and environmental cooperation, and human rights and takes steps to prevent, manage, and resolve conflict within and among its members. The OSCE also supports the democratic development of nations that gained or regained independence in the post-Cold War period and are still finding their footing, often torn between corruption and the promise of a democratic future. Thirteen OSCE field missions operate in member countries seeking assistance in developing their democratic institutions. The OSCE recognizes and supports the important role played by civil society and the media in holding governments to account for blatant human rights violations and abuses of power. Unprecedented Gap in OSCE Leadership OSCE institutions—including its assembly of national legislators—foster an essential defense against the spread of authoritarianism. However, despite its comprehensive vision, we are now faced with an unprecedented gap in leadership at the OSCE due to the block on the extension of mandates for four senior leaders, including the Secretary General. Each week, the OSCE Permanent Council—comprising ambassadors to the OSCE from each participating State—meets in Vienna, Austria. In this forum, the United States seeks to shine a light on contraventions of States’ OSCE tenets and violations of international law. The OSCE independent institutions, like the field missions, carry those messages forward.  In addition to the organization’s other work defending human rights and fundamental freedoms, its Office for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights (ODIHR) manages the OSCE’s election observation missions, internationally recognized as the “gold standard” for their methodology. Other independent offices lead the OSCE’s work on Freedom of the Media and rights of national minorities. Unfortunately, in July, these vital institutions were deprived of strong and consistent leadership by countries—including Azerbaijan, Tajikistan, and Turkey—that seem intent on attempting to weaken the OSCE’s ability to hold countries accountable for their actions and undermining the principles of the Helsinki Final Act. The executive and legislative branches of the U.S. government are partners in bringing American leadership to support the OSCE’s work. Several times each year,  members of Congress—including lawmakers serving on the U.S. Helsinki Commission, which monitors implementation of the Helsinki Accords  —gather at meetings of the OSCE Parliamentary Assembly, where they secure political commitments and build mutually beneficial relationships among legislators from the OSCE’s participating States to help push back against anti-democratic actions by national governments. Unfortunately, several OSCE participating States—countries that have repeatedly committed to upholding the principles and values enshrined in the Helsinki Final Act— are exhibiting a troubling slide toward authoritarianism. The United States and our democratic allies have criticized efforts to restrict and persecute journalists, human rights defenders, civil society, members of the political opposition, and members of ethnic and religious minorities. We also have jointly criticized efforts to stifle media freedom and limit political pluralism in Russia, Belarus, Azerbaijan, Tajikistan, and Turkmenistan, as well as raised concerns about media consolidation in Hungary, and limitations on freedom of speech and freedom of the press elsewhere. Russia’s Destabilizing Actions No OSCE participating State bears more responsibility for fomenting mistrust, insecurity, corruption, and human rights violations and abuses in this region than the Russian Federation. Russia’s destabilizing actions contravene all 10 Helsinki Final Act principles, ranging from respect for human rights to the prohibition of military incursions into neighboring countries. Russia continues its aggressive actions in Ukraine, including its purported annexation of Crimea. The proxy forces Russia arms, trains, leads, and fights alongside in eastern Ukraine make it dangerous for the unarmed OSCE Special Monitoring Mission to Ukraine to fulfill its Permanent Council-approved mandate to monitor the conflict. Russia uses its resources—economic, political, informational, and military—to defeat freedom and democracy. Russia does not rely on military force alone to threaten democratic governance; it also uses hybrid tactics daily, ranging from cyber intrusions to influence campaigns — aimed at undermining democratic elections. We hope that someday, authoritarian countries like Russia will start behaving again according to the rules of international law. Unfortunately, these countries currently reject the values of democracy, liberty, and human rights. The authoritarian regimes view democracy as an existential threat—hence the actions some of them have taken to restrict the OSCE’s ability to do its work.  The struggle today is between those who believe authoritarianism is the right way forward and those of us who still believe that Thomas Jefferson was right in his declaration that the desire for freedom exists within the heart of every human being. In a hyper-connected modern world in which disinformation becomes an ever more powerful weapon and the divisions within free societies are exploited by malign actors, U.S. membership in organizations like the OSCE emphasizes clearly, openly, and emphatically that America will not cede the field to the authoritarian regimes. We will not allow them to be the ones to dictate what is truth and what is fiction. Human Rights and Ideals Just as Valid in 2020 Through the OSCE, the United States directly confronts the deceit of Russia and other authoritarian powers. By raising our voices, through our participation and leadership, we reassure our friends that the United States stands with them and supports our shared values against the growing tide of autocracy. By raising our voices, we remind allies and adversaries alike that the United States remains engaged and committed to what is fair, what is right, and what is true. Together, our U.S. Mission to the OSCE and the U.S. Helsinki Commission remind allies and adversaries alike that America will not ignore regimes that are actively hostile to our values and see our liberty as an existential threat. We will always prioritize respect for human rights and fundamental freedoms, defend the principles of liberty, and encourage tolerance within societies, because such efforts are vital to the promotion of democracy and to U.S. national security. We reject the authoritarian notion that our fundamental freedoms are a weakness. They are our greatest strength. The United States and other like-minded countries use the power of the OSCE to show that human rights and ideals are just as valid in 2020 as they were in 1975, when the Helsinki Accords were signed. These rights not only ensure the physical, economic, and mental wellbeing of all our populations, they make the countries’ governments stronger by building legitimacy in the eyes of their citizens. America’s unwavering support of these values through multilateral organizations like the OSCE remains vital. As noted in the Trump administration’s U.S. National Security Strategy, “Authoritarian actors have long recognized the power of multilateral bodies and have used them to advance their interests and limit the freedom of their own citizens.  If the United States cedes leadership of these bodies to adversaries, opportunities to shape developments that are positive for the United States will be lost.” The OSCE deserves to be recognized by the people of both the United States and our allies and partners as a valuable tool in the fight against autocracy. We must not abandon it by leaving its most important institutions without leadership beyond its 45th anniversary. Instead, through our efforts, and those of our allies and partners in the OSCE, we must continue to defend liberty and human rights in our region and provide a beacon of hope for citizens everywhere who aspire to a free and democratic future.

  • E.U. Tries Gentle Diplomacy to Counter Hungary’s Crackdown on Democracy

    European leaders were reluctant to pick a fight with Prime Minister Viktor Orban a day after he secured powers to rule by decree indefinitely. BRUSSELS — The European Union’s written response to Hungary’s effective suspension of democracy omitted one important word: Hungary. A day after the Hungarian Parliament passed sweeping emergency measures allowing the far-right populist leader Viktor Orban to rule by decree indefinitely, ostensibly as part of the country’s response to the coronavirus, the European Commission on Tuesday reminded its members to respect rights. But it was a muted first response from the one institution that can take on Mr. Orban, and it appeared aimed at balancing the political imperative of cooperation in the era of the coronavirus with the risk of emboldening him. “It’s of utmost importance that emergency measures are not at the expense of our fundamental principles and values,” Ursula von der Leyen, the president of the European Commission, said in a statement that made no mention of Mr. Orban or Hungary. The European Commission is the European Union’s executive branch, and it often describes itself as “the guardian of the treaty” that created the bloc of 27 democracies. But Mr. Orban has long been in an open struggle with parts of that treaty. He has said frankly that he does not believe in liberal democracy — which the European Commission says is fundamental to the European Union’s values. The severe measures adopted Monday in Budapest may dramatically ratchet up the confrontation between the Orban government and European Union institutions in Brussels. Hungary’s new legislation suspends elections and also allows the prime minister to suspend existing laws and rule by decree. One vaguely worded section also says that people found to be spreading “falsehoods” or “distorted truths” that obstruct the authorities from protecting the public may be punished with prison sentences of up to five years. That new tool that may allow Mr. Orban to further curb the press freedoms long in his cross hairs. To be sure, in the face of the epidemic, European countries have all to lesser or greater extent adopted emergency measures curbing liberties, including measures that require citizens to register any movement and observe curfews. But Hungary’s new rules are the most far reaching. And rights experts, political analysts and academics say that, given Mr. Orban’s track record and espousal of “illiberal democracy,” the measures he says he is taking to fight the virus could become fixtures in Hungarian public life, used to crack down on opposition well after the threat of the virus passes. European Union officials believe that the statement issued Tuesday, which came from Ms. von der Leyen personally, sent a clear message to Mr. Orban — even without naming him. European Commission lawyers are now closely watching how he enforces Hungary’s new measures, the officials said. But they said that now — as Europe battles to stem the spread of the virus and mitigate its catastrophic economic damage, and with many nations suspending some liberties — was not the moment to pick a fight with just one member. That measured approach surprised some observers, despite the fact that the commission often takes a conciliatory stance toward wayward members in a bid to entice them to reform voluntarily. (That has never worked with Hungary.) “It is bizarre,” Daniel Freund, a member of the European Parliament who belongs to the German Greens political party, said of Ms. von der Leyen’s statement. “The decision that the Hungarian Parliament took yesterday is a watershed moment,” Mr. Freund said. “Now you have to do something, or we really lose democracies.” Mr. Freund and other members of the European Parliament believe that even before the European Commission opens a formal investigation into Hungary’s new law, which would take months, it should use existing rules to put pressure on Mr. Orban. “If we end up after the crisis with a virus well fought but democracy lost in several member states, that’s an unacceptable situation,” Mr. Freund said. Daniel Kelemen, a professor European Union politics and law at Rutgers University, said the epidemic could prove an opportunity for the Hungarian leader. “Throughout his consolidation of power, Orban has counted on the European Union to be distracted with other crises,” he said. “But now,” Mr. Kelemen said, “the scale of this crisis does call for consolidation of power for the executive, so it gives him more effective cover for this next stage of escalation.” Mr. Orban’s hold on power was unparalleled by European Union standards well before Monday’s vote authorizing him to rule by decree. In practical terms, Mr. Orban and his allies already controlled the legislative and executives branches of government, and had stacked the Constitutional Court. With Mr. Orban’s parliamentary opposition unable to slow his political machine, the European Union has shown itself to be the only entity capable of curbing his power, but the results have been mixed. Lengthy and cumbersome European Union legal proceedings could not stop Mr. Orban and his allies from taking over the Hungarian media landscape, weakening the independence of the judiciary, levying a special tax on nongovernmental organizations receiving foreign funding, or ejecting the Central European University from the country. In the end it may be Mr. Orban’s love for European financial aid, not freedoms, that acts as a brake on his government. “Aware that the European Union is watching, Orban is likely to tread modestly at first,” said Mujtaba Rahman, the head of Europe at Eurasia Group consultancy. “He will not wish to put at risk the €5.6 billion windfall granted to Hungary by the European Parliament last week as its portion in the union’s efforts to battle the coronavirus." President Trump has warmly embraced Mr. Orban. Mr. Trump’s ambassador in Hungary has spoken glowingly about Mr. Orban’s grip on power and said that Mr. Trump would love to have the powers of his Hungarian counterpart. But Mr. Orban’s autocratic tendencies have long alarmed others in Washington, particularly lawmakers who serve on the Commission on Security and Cooperation in Europe, known as the Helsinki Commission. A congressional delegation visited Hungary last year to investigate democratic backsliding.

  • Why the Helsinki Commission still matters

    Forty four years ago, President Gerald Ford joined 35 other heads of state, including longstanding American adversaries, to sign one of the most significant international agreements of the 20th Century—the Final Act of the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe, better known as the Helsinki Accords. The accord committed the United States, Europe, and the Soviet Union to respect human rights, to manage the spread of dangerous weapons, to foster economic opportunity, and to ending the territorial disputes in Europe that had already twice plunged the world into war. The U.S. Commission on Security and Cooperation in Europe, better known as the Helsinki Commission, was created to uphold these commitments. Since its inception, the Helsinki Commission has provided a crucial voice for defending freedom, opportunity, and human rights across the world. Composed of members of Congress from both parties and chosen from the House and Senate, the Helsinki Commission represents our democracy’s commitment to preserving and advancing the peace, freedom, and prosperity across the world that previous generations of Americans sacrificed so much to achieve. That is why I am honored to be among the latest members of Congress to be appointed to serve on the Helsinki Commission. The world has changed dramatically since the Helsinki Commission began, but the need to defend the principles of freedom, opportunity and human rights is greater than ever. Rising authoritarian powers are contesting the principles of democracy like never before--these powers are undermining a fair and free electoral process by interfering with elections across the democratic west and directly invading their neighbors. The most shocking part is that the United States’ own commitment to values is being challenged from within—from the very officeholder once considered the leader of the free world. The challenges that democracies face today signify the work that this Commission is doing is now more important than ever. Who better to respond to a president who rejects the pillars of traditional American foreign policy than a bipartisan commission composed of members of Congress? I am hopeful that my Republican colleagues on this Commission, who understand the importance of American leadership on the issues of human rights and democracy, will feel the same way. I am eager to get to work and face the challenges that this position presents. I look forward to having the opportunity to make a positive impact on the world, as well as ensuring that the priorities of the great state of Texas are represented on an international stage. It’s on those of us entrusted by the American people with representing them in Congress to make clear to the world that despite what they may hear from the White House, our country is still the same country that showed up, negotiated and implemented the Helsinki Accords—one that leads in defending freedom, opportunity and human rights across the world. Congressman Marc Veasey is a proud representative of Texas’ 33rd District in the U.S. House of Representatives.

  • A Push to Let the U.S. Charge Foreign Officials With Bribery

    One of the hallmarks of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act has been that it cannot be used against a foreign official who demands or takes a bribe for helping a company win a contract or retain business. A bill introduced in Congress this month seeks to change that. Called the Foreign Extortion Prevention Act, the legislation would expand the prohibition on bribery to foreign officials who demanded or solicited bribes. The Foreign Corrupt Practices Act’s prohibition on paying bribes abroad is limited to companies in the United States and those acting in this country. It has always excluded the foreign official who takes the bribe, and courts over the years have reaffirmed that. In United States v. Castle, a 1991 decision, the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit found that two Canadian officials could not be prosecuted for a conspiracy to violate the F.C.P.A. because Congress exempted foreign officials. In United States v. Hoskins, a 2018 ruling, the federal appeals court in Manhattan held that a foreign national who was never in the United States could not be prosecuted under the foreign bribery law because “Congress did not intend for persons outside of the statute’s carefully delimited categories to be subject to conspiracy or complicity liability.” The bill, which has both Democrats and Republicans as sponsors, would put the prohibition on a foreign official’s accepting a bribe under the federal anti-bribery statute, 18 U.S.C. § 201, rather than the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act. The proposal would also make it a crime for a foreign official “otherwise than as provided by law for the proper discharge of official duty” to demand or accept anything of value for being influenced in the performance of official responsibilities. But putting the prohibition under the federal anti-bribery statute would subject it to the limitations the Supreme Court placed on the law in its 2016 ruling in McDonnell v. United States. That case overturned the conviction of a former governor of Virginia by rejecting a broad reading of what is an “official act.” The justices explained that it must involve “a formal exercise of governmental power that is similar in nature to a lawsuit, administrative determination or hearing.” They found that “merely setting up a meeting, hosting an event or contacting an official — without more — does not count as an ‘official act.’” Favoring a business by arranging meetings or contacting other foreign officials to help it win a contract may not rise to the level of an “official act,” especially if the foreign official who received the bribe did not have the direct authority to decide who should be awarded a contract. So the potential limitations on the federal bribery statute could be read into prosecutions of foreign officials for accepting bribes that violated the F.C.P.A. The F.C.P.A. also contains two defenses that were added in 1988. One is the “local law” defense, which allows a defendant to show that under the written laws and regulations of the place where the bribe occurred that it was not illegal. Another defense permits small “facilitation payments” to obtain routine government action in the country. In both situations, a foreign official could argue that these defenses should preclude liability for accepting a payment. A greater potential issue for the Justice Department if the legislation becomes law is whether a foreign official will be brought to the United States to face a criminal charge. If the person is still in office, a foreign government may be reluctant to send the person to America. But a criminal indictment would most likely limit where the foreign official could travel. The person would need to avoid countries that have an extradition treaty with the United States. The Department of Justice has not been without tools to punish foreign officials who engage in bribery. The money-laundering statute allows a foreign official receiving money through bribery, misappropriation or theft of public funds to be charged with a crime. Federal prosecutors could also use the Travel Act, which prohibits traveling into the United States to engage in bribery. Both statutes, though, require either travel to the United States or a financial transaction using the United States financial system. The new legislation would make it much easier to pursue a foreign official. The Justice Department would not have to show a connection to the United States beyond a payment by an American company. Whether it would result in an increase in prosecutions is a different question. Still, simply charging the official could have the effect of identifying who was responsible in a country for accepting illegal bribes. That should make it easier for American companies and their employees to demand fairness from foreign officials rather than being extorted for payments.

  • The U.S. must stand up to Erdogan and his politically motivated detentions

    Last fall, Americans rejoiced as the pastor Andrew Brunson, a North Carolina native, returned home after spending more than two years in Turkish prisons on baseless terrorism and espionage charges. A combination of congressional pressure and targeted sanctions on Turkish officials sent a clear message to President Recep Tayyip Erdogan that the United States would not tolerate his using Brunson as a pawn to extract political concessions. Faced with mounting political and economic costs, Erdogan caved. Sadly, the pastor’s release did not put an end to Erdogan’s hostage-taking. Today, the Turkish government continues to hold at least one American citizen and two Turkish employees of the U.S. government on false charges. Erdogan plans to inflict misery on these innocent people until he gets what he wants out of the United States — whether that is a green light to attack Kurdish strongholds in northern Syria, taking legal action against Fethullah Gulen and his followers in the United States, or U.S. acquiescence to Turkey’s purchase of a Russian air defense system. Such attempts at extortion are all the more galling coming from Turkey, an important NATO ally that is not acting like one. American citizen and NASA physicist Serkan Golge is serving a five-year prison sentence for alleged involvement in terrorism, despite no credible evidence of wrongdoing. Turkish police have also used false terrorism charges to detain three longtime Turkish employees of U.S. consulates in the country: Hamza Ulucay, Metin Topuz, and Mete Canturk. Golge and Topuz are in solitary confinement, where they have spent up to two-and-a-half years with only an hour of fresh air per week. Ulucay was released earlier this year after being held for nearly two years. Canturk remains under house arrest, and his family is subject to travel bans and regular police check-ins. These men are all innocent. Not only have they lost irreplaceable time with their families, but the physical and psychological toll of their ordeal also means they may never be the same once they regain their liberty. The United States did not tolerate the politically motivated detention and mistreatment of a U.S. citizen in the case of Pastor Brunson. We should not tolerate those acts now with Golge or longtime U.S. government employees. As the United States increased pressure on Turkey over Brunson, it simultaneously tried to cut a deal with Erdogan for the freedom of the other detainees. By now, it is abundantly clear that no amount of coaxing will secure their freedom. Any negotiation over their fate would only reward Erdogan’s bad behavior. As with Brunson, only stiff political and economic pressure will work. This week, I introduced the bipartisan Defending United States Citizens and Diplomatic Staff from Political Prosecutions Act of 2019, which would require the president to impose sanctions on all senior Turkish officials responsible for these wrongful detentions, including barring them from travel to the United States and freezing any assets they have here. The bill further calls on President Trump to urge Turkey to restore due-process guarantees and respect for the fundamental freedoms of all its people, thousands of whom are victims of the same sort of politically motivated prosecution and indefinite detention endured by our citizens and consulate personnel. The United States has a particular moral obligation to protect our own citizens. Golge’s wrongful imprisonment at the hands of the Turkish government cannot stand. We also have moral obligations to our local staff overseas. Thousands of citizens of other countries work at U.S. government facilities around the globe, lending their diverse expertise to critical U.S. missions, often at great risk to themselves and their families. The credibility of the United States is at stake in the eyes of these courageous individuals who place their trust and safety in our hands. The fate of their colleagues in Turkey weighs heavily on the minds of our consular staff, as it does on our national conscience. No effort should be spared until they are free.

  • U.S. senators introduce bill to sanction Turkish officials over detentions

    Two U.S. senators on Tuesday introduced a bipartisan bill requiring the imposition of sanctions on Turkish officials responsible for the detentions of U.S. citizens and local consulate staff in Turkey, a statement on the legislation said. The bill, introduced by Republican Senator Roger Wicker and Democrat Ben Cardin, also calls on President Donald Trump to urge Turkey to respect for the fundamental freedoms, saying thousands were victims of politically-motivated prosecution. “The Turkish government’s false imprisonment of Americans and Turkish citizens employed by the United States in Turkey is a gross violation of their human rights,” Senator Cardin said in the statement. “Our bill makes clear that the United States will not tolerate years of Turkish recalcitrance on these cases.” The detention of U.S. consulate workers and American citizens is one of many issues dividing NATO allies Ankara and Washington, also at loggerheads over Syria policy and Turkey’s planned purchase of Russian missile defenses. Their detentions prompted Washington in October 2017 to suspend all non-immigrant visa applications from the country, triggering a reciprocal move from Ankara that contributed to a deep crisis in bilateral ties. The bill introduced Tuesday would require the U.S. administration to impose sanctions on all senior Turkish officials responsible for the “wrongful” detentions of U.S. citizens and staff, including barring the officials from travel to the United States and freezing any U.S. assets. Turkey has detained tens of thousands of people following a failed coup in July 2016, saying they were linked with the network of Fethullah Gulen, a U.S.-based Islamic cleric blamed by Ankara for orchestrating the putsch. U.S. pastor Andrew Brunson was among those jailed in the aftermath of the coup. He was released last October. “While the Turkish government made a step in the right direction with the release of Pastor Andrew Brunson last October, more needs to be done for Turkey to show good faith and act like a NATO ally,” said Republican Senator Thom Tillis, one of six original sponsors of Tuesday’s bill. Serkan Golge, a dual Turkish-U.S. citizen, was found guilty of being a member of an armed terrorist organization earlier this year and sentenced to seven years, six months in prison. Three other Turkish citizens who were working at the U.S. consulates in Turkey have been under investigation or jailed over similar charges. A Turkish court last month ruled that one of the consular workers, Metin Topuz, a translator and fixer in Istanbul, should remain in jail until his trial resumes in June.

  • The Cold War Is Over, But The OSCE's Value Is Timeless

    History has shown that robust engagement in multilateral arenas represents long-term realism: to lead, we must be involved; to protect our national interests and the principles we hold dear, we must remain engaged; and to inspire those who suffer every day under authoritarian regimes, we must hold our own country to the highest standards on the world stage. Unfortunately, efforts to maintain America’s preeminence in the world have come under increasing pressure in recent years. These challenges are not isolated and are waged on many fronts – economically, militarily, and diplomatically. Some may use these challenges as an excuse to retreat, claiming that engagement in international organizations like the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) adds no value. We believe that quite the opposite is true. If we want to continue to lead, protect, and inspire, we need the OSCE’s opportunities for multilateral engagement more than ever. Amid the alphabet soup of institutional acronyms, many Americans probably have not heard of the OSCE, let alone know that it is the largest regional security organization in the world. Comprising 57 countries, it links Vancouver in the West to Vladivostok in the East, spanning North America, Europe, and Central Asia. We are members of the organization’s Parliamentary Assembly, where we have represented our country and our principles in a forum of international lawmakers for a combined 34 years. We have engaged the OSCE, as a whole, even longer. We know firsthand the value of U.S. leadership and sustained high-level engagement in the organization – and conversely, we know the enormous risks that would come with retreat. A Broader Definition of Security The essential, enduring value of the OSCE can be traced back to its founding and the ideological transformation that it quietly unleashed. In the 1950s, the Soviet Union first conceived the idea of the Helsinki Final Act. The founding charter of the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe, or CSCE, later institutionalized as today’s OSCE, would eventually be signed in 1975. Moscow saw the document as a way to validate post-World War II border changes and tighten its stranglehold on Eastern Europe. The Kremlin, no doubt, also hoped to create an alternative to NATO and weaken U.S. ties to Europe. As troops massed along the Iron Curtain after the Soviet-led invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968, Europe began to see some value in greater East-West engagement. The United States saw the Soviet proposal as a damage-mitigation exercise at best. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger famously decried the Helsinki Final Act, saying, “They can write it in Swahili for all I care… The Conference can never end up with a meaningful document.” Opposition to the Helsinki Final Act was not limited to Foggy Bottom. The Wall Street Journal published the editorial “Jerry, Don’t Go” just prior to President Ford’s departure to sign the document in Finland, reflecting widespread opposition from U.S. foreign policy hawks and Americans across the country who descended from the “captive nations” of Eastern Europe. What most observers at the time overlooked, however, was the Helsinki Final Act’s uniquely comprehensive definition of “security.” The Act contains 10 principles guiding inter-state relations, including respect for human rights and fundamental freedoms; respect for sovereign equality; recognition of the territorial integrity of states; and the commitment of states to fulfill in good faith their obligations under international law. The integration of human rights into a concept of security was revolutionary. The Act also provided that any country signatory could publicly challenge any other country that wasn’t living up to Helsinki principles, either internally or externally. This was remarkable for its time. These two innovations made the Act a rallying point for human rights advocates everywhere, especially dissident movements in the one-party communist states of the Soviet bloc. Groups like Charter 77 in Czechoslovakia, Solidarity in Poland, and other monitoring groups in the Soviet Union and Baltic States that were crucial to the eventual collapse of communism in Europe relied on Helsinki commitments in their advocacy. With U.S. leadership, meetings of the CSCE also became venues for frank exchanges, where countries committing human rights abuses were named and victims identified. The strongest weapons in the U.S. arsenal – democratic ideals, market principles, and the primacy of individual rights – rallied European friends and allies, attracted Soviet satellites, and left Moscow isolated, if not fully convinced. Today's Inflection Point We were both serving in the House of Representatives shortly after the Soviet Union collapsed in the early 1990s. We were aware that the transitions ahead would be difficult, particularly as horrific ethnic cleansing spread in the Balkans and a brutal war was waged in Chechnya. Although we were on opposite sides of the aisle, we were joined in our conviction that liberal democracy would ultimately prevail throughout Europe and into Central Asia. Unfortunately, our confidence was dramatically misplaced. Thirty years later, instead of the peace and prosperity we expected in the OSCE region, we are at an inflection point, faced with uncertainty and the increasing erosion of the security framework that followed the Cold War. In recent elections, we’ve watched nationalist parties gain a strong foothold in Europe. NATO ally Turkey – one of the world’s most oppressive regimes toward journalists – is succumbing to authoritarian rule, weakening checks on executive power and targeting more than 100,000 perceived opponents of the ruling party in sweeping purges. Vladimir Putin continues to violate the sovereignty and territorial integrity of not just Ukraine – where, in areas controlled by Russia, pro-Ukrainian sentiment is met with imprisonment, torture, or death – but also Georgia, where Russia has occupied 20 percent of the country’s territory for more than a decade. The Russian government supports separatists in the Transnistrian region of Moldova, interferes in elections in the United States and Europe, and undermines faith in democratic governments worldwide through cyberattacks and information warfare. An era of increasing nationalism, Kremlin revisionism, and rising authoritarianism may not, at first, seem to be the best moment to revitalize multilateral diplomacy. But it has been, and will continue to be, in our national interest to promote democracy, the rule of law, and human rights around the world – just as we did more than 40 years ago in the Finnish capital. Those Helsinki commitments, and their institutionalization over time, empower us to stand up for our values and for comprehensive security at a time in which we absolutely must. In April 2017, we – along with every other senator currently serving on the Helsinki Commission – introduced a resolution urging President Trump to recognize the importance of the Helsinki Final Act and the OSCE as well as their relevance to American national security. We hope the administration will endorse this effort. A Record of Results The value of the OSCE and the effectiveness of American involvement are evident in the organization’s more recent evolution and achievements. This is no Cold War relic. We have seen examples of multilateral success in many initiatives, beginning with its quick embrace of newly independent states, from the Balkans to Eastern Europe and Central Asia. As multiethnic states broke apart, the OSCE created a high commissioner on national minorities in 1992 to address ethnic tensions and proactively prevent conflict between or within states over national minority issues. Participating states developed mechanisms to respond to the most recalcitrant actors, such as the unprecedented suspension of Yugoslavia the same year for the “clear, gross, and uncorrected” violations of Helsinki principles by the regime of Slobodan Milosevic against Bosnia and Herzegovina. Under OSCE auspices, internal political confrontations in Serbia in 1996 and Albania in 1997 were resolved through high-level engagement before they became a broader threat to peace and prosperity in Europe. The United States led the way, generating the political will to act quickly and with resolve. Robust field missions also were created in the 1990s to respond to conflicts, first in the Balkans and then extending into Eastern Europe, the Caucasus, and Central Asia. In some places, such as Kosovo, the OSCE often was the only acceptable international monitor or facilitator on the ground, serving as the eyes and ears of the international community, bringing opposing sides together, and mitigating spillover effects in neighboring countries. Today, the OSCE’s civilian Special Monitoring Mission (SMM) to Ukraine is the only independent observer group in the war zone. Established in 2014 to monitor implementation of the Minsk Agreements, its approximately 700 monitors provide clear and unbiased reporting of ceasefire violations and human costs of the conflict. Approximately half of the U.S. contribution to the OSCE goes toward funding the SMM. The mission faces challenges, including attempts to sabotage its work and concerns about security. The latter was tragically demonstrated by the death of Joseph Stone, a U.S. paramedic killed last year when his vehicle struck a landmine in separatist-controlled territory. Without the SMM’s reporting, however, we would lack critical information to understand and address ongoing Russian aggression against Ukraine. Kremlin propaganda would have a clear field to disguise the true nature and scale of the conflict. The OSCE also sets the gold standard for election observation across the region. The organization’s trained observers partner with international lawmakers, including ourselves, to analyze election-related laws and systems and the effectiveness of their implementation. The evaluations that these missions produce are critical benchmarks for OSCE countries and support U.S. efforts to promote human rights, democracy, and the rule of law around the world. Pressure from the organization and its participating states has been a major factor in the release of political prisoners in countries like Azerbaijan. For example, the OSCE Office for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights, the OSCE Representative on Freedom of the Media, and the OSCE Parliamentary Assembly publicly condemned Baku for its targeting of investigative journalist Khadija Ismayilova and the broader use of its judicial system to repress political opponents, journalists, and minorities. The Helsinki Commission also weighed in. In May 2016, Ismayilova was released from prison. Our actions in this and similar cases demonstrate global leadership. We welcome the recent nomination of a new U.S. permanent representative to the OSCE. This important post has remained vacant for far too long. We urge our Senate colleagues to swiftly consider the nominee, who will be responsible for leading America’s vigorous defense of democracy and human rights in the region. Let us also not overlook the fact that our work in the OSCE in relation to Russia is not simply to counter Moscow’s anti-democratic ambitions. Follow-up meetings to the original Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe became one of a shrinking number of places where East-West dialogue could take place during the Cold War. Likewise, after Russia was suspended from the G8 in March 2014, today’s OSCE provides one of the few remaining opportunities to engage with Russia and hold the Kremlin accountable to principles it has endorsed. Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov attends OSCE ministerial meetings, where he easily – and with great success – engages with senior officials from around the region. That alone should encourage our secretary of state to be present. Secretary Tillerson attended the 2017 ministerial, and we urge Secretary Pompeo to do the same. Future Challenges Along with successes, we also have seen areas where multilateralism has fallen short. Areas like Nagorno-Karabakh, Transnistria, Chechnya, Abkhazia, and South Ossetia have consumed OSCE attention and resources, but unfortunately, the organization’s actions have not thawed these frozen conflicts. The OSCE may have kept things from getting worse than they might have been otherwise; this is something to praise, but cannot yet be counted as a win. These efforts have been hindered in part by the otherwise positive requirement that major decisions in the organization require consensus. This rule is vital to the OSCE’s success. The organization can convene all parties on an even footing and – because no country can claim that it didn’t voluntarily agree to its commitments – the rule gives unique force to the OSCE’s actions. However, decision-making by consensus also allows a single intransigent country to wield its veto as a weapon, even in cases of otherwise overwhelming agreement. In 2008, Russia successfully blocked the OSCE from establishing a field mission in Georgia as Russian-backed separatists occupied South Ossetia and Abkhazia. Since then, resistance to hosting or authorizing field missions, a core capability of the OSCE, has spread. Belarus kicked out its OSCE mission in 2011. Azerbaijan forced the mission in Baku to close in 2015, and two years later, it insisted on the shuttering of a mission in Armenia. Mongolia, the newest OSCE participating state, has repeatedly requested a mission to foster its continued democratic development and build closer ties with other participating states. Moscow consistently blocks that request. A related and ongoing problem is the lack of transparency of the OSCE’s decision-making. Opening its official deliberations to the public would help make those countries that thwart progress more broadly accountable for their recalcitrance. A more recent challenge comes from the government of Turkey. Ankara continues to use the 2016 coup attempt as pretext for not only violently repressing its citizens and detaining others, including Americans, but also for limiting the participation of non-governmental organizations in certain OSCE meetings. The OSCE is the only international organization that allows NGOs to participate equally with governments in meetings on human rights commitments, allowing these groups to raise their concerns directly. If Turkey has its way, human rights groups might be denied a seat at the table. It is easy to imagine which countries quietly hope this effort will succeed. The United States must continue to make it clear that it is not one of them. Indeed, the moral here is that the United States should not only support the strengths and potential of the OSCE, but we must also be present and potent when progress and principles are challenged within the organization. Our colleagues in both chambers of Congress have the passion and determination to do just that. In these days of partisan discord, we must remember – and treasure – the fact that Congress is broadly committed to the principles enshrined in the Helsinki Final Act: respect for human rights and fundamental freedoms, democratic principles, and liberty. We see this in the establishment of the Helsinki Commission itself, a unique agency conceived by Congress to strengthen the legitimacy of human rights monitoring, defend those persecuted for acting on their rights and freedoms, and ensure that violations of Helsinki provisions are given full consideration in U.S. foreign policy. The OSCE’s broad membership and comprehensive definition of security make it an ideal platform to advocate for our interests in a vital region. Its institutions remain singularly placed to moderate regional conflicts, promote respect for human rights, and safeguard essential elements of democracy. We have not only the right, but also the duty, to hold countries responsible if they fail to adhere to the basic principles that we all agreed to in 1975. We also have the responsibility to hear and consider other participating states when they feel that the United States is not fully meeting our commitments. Leading by example means that we must be held accountable, too. At this critical juncture, when the rules-based order appears particularly fragile, any weakening or absence of the OSCE could irreversibly damage the chances for democracy and peace in the region. We must not allow that to happen – and the key is our own steadfastness, in words and deeds. Roger Wicker (@SenatorWicker) is chairman of the U.S. Helsinki Commission and a vice president of the OSCE Parliamentary Assembly. A member of the Republican Party, he has represented Mississippi in the Senate since December 2007. He previously represented Mississippi for 13 years in the House of Representatives. Ben Cardin (@SenatorCardin) is ranking Senate member of the U.S. Helsinki Commission. He serves as special representative on anti-Semitism, racism, and intolerance for the OSCE Parliamentary Assembly. A member of the Democratic Party, he has represented Maryland in the Senate since January 2007 after 20 years in the House of Representatives.

  • Hearing points to Putin’s role in Russian doping scandal

    WASHINGTON (AP) — Supporters of a bill that would make international sports doping a crime argued Wednesday that the legislation would deter scandals like Russian state-sponsored drug use at the 2014 Sochi Olympics. Yulia Stepanova, a Russian former track athlete who became a whistleblower about the drug program, said at a congressional hearing that ending doping in her country would have to “start from the top” — with Russian President Vladimir Putin himself. The bill was named for Dr. Grigory Rodchenkov, the Russian lab director who exposed the cheating in Sochi. Rodchenkov has said the doping stemmed from Putin’s command to his sports ministry to “win at any cost.” Several European countries have passed similar legislation. The bill being considered in the House is stronger because it would allow the United States to police doping that occurs outside its borders. U.S. and foreign athletes would be subject to the law if competing in an event that includes four or more U.S. athletes and athletes from three or more countries. The bill has bipartisan support but has yet to be introduced in the Senate, and its prospects for approval are unclear. The hearing occurred while, in the same Senate office building, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo was questioned by lawmakers who accused President Donald Trump of being too soft on Putin. While the president has made conflicting claims about the extent of Russian interference in the 2016 election, the hearing on doping turned attention back to other ways in which Putin’s actions have brought scorn from the international community. In written testimony, Rodchenkov and Stepanova said that those who participated in the doping program were essentially following orders, fearing that to refuse or speak out would mean the end of their careers, or possibly even lead to their deaths. “You will lose your job, your career and even fear for the safety of you and your family,” Stepanova said. “You will be called a liar and a traitor if you stand up against the system that unfortunately still exists in Russia today.” Asked by Democratic Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee of Texas how to end Russian doping, Stepanova said, “It should start from the top because if it started from the top, they ... would stop doping.” “If Mr. Putin had a different attitude and expressed that, it would stop?” Jackson Lee asked. “Yes, I think so,” Stepanova said. Rodchenkov did not attend the hearing, but his attorney, Jim Walden, said he and his client believe Putin needs to be held accountable. “There are some in our government who refuse to confront Russia for its abject criminality,” Walden said. “Doping fraud is one more example of the gangster state that Vladimir Putin has created in Russia.” The hearing also featured emotional testimony from Katie Uhlaender, who finished fourth in skeleton — by four hundredths of a second — in Sochi to Elena Nikitina of Russia. Nikitina’s bronze medal was later stripped for suspected doping before the Court of Arbitration for Sport restored it on the eve of the Pyeongchang Olympics. Uhlaender feels that she was unfairly denied a medal twice, although it’s still possible she could prevail on appeal. “My moment was stolen,” Uhlaender said through tears. “A line was crossed. It erased the meaning of sport and the Olympics as I knew it.” Travis Tygart, CEO of the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency, said he would continue trying to persuade Congress to address international doping and called on the corporations that sponsor the Olympics to join the effort. “If the governments of the world aren’t going to step up and do something about it, where are the corporations? They’re profiting off the backs of these athletes,” Tygart said. “I think it all it would take would be a couple phone calls from them to get this situation fixed and cleaned up. But where are they? They’re sitting there counting the money.”

  • Maine native honored that Russia wants to interrogate him

    A Maine native is on the list of U.S. officials that Russian President Vladimir Putin says he’d like his prosecutors to interrogate. Old Town native and former U.S. House committee staffer Kyle Parker helped draft sanctions against Russians suspected of human rights violations. Parker tweeted Tuesday he was “honored” to make Putin’s list. Congress passed 2012 sanctions following Russian lawyer Sergei Magnitsky’s death in prison after exposing a tax fraud scheme involving Russian officials. The White House Thursday said Trump “disagrees” with Putin’s offer to allow U.S. questioning of 12 Russians who have been indicted for election interference. Putin in exchange wanted Russian interviews with the former U.S. ambassador to Russia and other Americans the Kremlin accuses of unspecified crimes. Trump initially had described the idea as an “incredible offer.”

  • What’s really behind Putin’s obsession with the Magnitsky Act

    Standing by President Trump’s side in Helsinki for their first bilateral summit, Russian President Vladimir Putin made what Trump described as an “incredible” offer: He would help U.S. investigators gain access to Russian intelligence officers indicted for the 2016 election hacking, on one small condition. “We would expect that the Americans would reciprocate and they would question [U.S.] officials … who have something to do with illegal actions on the territory of Russia,” Putin said, producing the name to indicate what actions he had in mind: “Mr. Browder.” Bill Browder, an American-born financier, came to Russia in the 1990s. The grandson of a former general secretary of the Communist Party USA, Browder by his own admission wanted to become “the biggest capitalist in Russia.” He succeeded and was for a decade the country’s largest portfolio foreign investor. Whatever the sins of Russia’s freewheeling capitalism, Browder’s real crime in the eyes of the Kremlin came later, after he had been expelled from Russia in 2005. In 2008, his Moscow lawyer, Sergei Magnitsky, uncovered a tax scam involving government officials that defrauded Russian taxpayers of $230 million. He did what any law-abiding citizen would, reporting the crime to the relevant authorities. In return, he was arrested and held in detention without trial for almost a year. He was beaten and died on Nov. 16, 2009, at Moscow’s Matrosskaya Tishina prison under mysterious circumstances. Officials involved in his case received awards and promotions. In a chilling act worthy of Kafka, the only trial held in the Magnitsky case was a posthumous sentencing of himself — the only trial against a dead man in the history of Russia. It was then that Browder turned from investment to full-time advocacy, traveling the world to persuade one Western parliament after another to pass a measure that was as groundbreaking as it would appear obvious: a law, commemoratively named the Magnitsky Act, that bars individuals (from Russia and elsewhere) who are complicit in human rights abuses and corruption from traveling to the West, owning assets in the West and using the financial system of the West. Boris Nemtsov, then Russia’s opposition leader (who played a key role in convincing Congress to pass the law in 2012), called the Magnitsky Act “the most pro-Russian law in the history of any foreign Parliament.” It was the smartest approach to sanctions. It avoided the mistake of targeting Russian citizens at large for the actions of a small corrupt clique in the Kremlin and placed responsibility directly where it is due. It was also the most effective approach. The people who are in charge of Russia today like to pose as patriots, but in reality, they care little about the country. They view it merely as a looting ground, where they can amass personal fortunes at the expense of Russian taxpayers and then transfer those fortunes to the West. In one of his anti-corruption reports, Nemtsov detailed the unexplained riches attained by Putin’s personal friends such as Gennady Timchenko, Yuri Kovalchuk and the Rotenberg brothers, noting that they are likely “no more that the nominal owners … and the real ultimate beneficiary is Putin himself.” Similar suspicions were voiced after the publication of the 2016 Panama Papers, which showed a $2 billion offshore trail leading to another close Putin friend, cellist Sergei Roldugin. Some of the funds in his accounts were linked with money from the tax fraud scheme uncovered by Magnitsky. Volumes of research, hours of expert testimony and countless policy recommendations have been dedicated to finding effective Western approaches to Putin’s regime. The clearest and the most convincing answer was provided, time and again, by the Putin regime itself. It was the Magnitsky Act that Putin tasked his foreign ministry with trying to stop; it was the Magnitsky Act that was openly tied to the ban on child adoptions; it was the Magnitsky Act that was the subject of the 2016 Trump Tower meeting attended by a Kremlin-linked lawyer; it is advocating for the Magnitsky Act that may soon land any Russian citizen in prison. It was the Magnitsky Act that Putin named as the biggest threat to his regime as he stood by Trump’s side in Helsinki. After the Trump-Putin meeting, the Russian Prosecutor-General’s Office released the names of U.S. citizens it wants to question as supposed associates of Browder. The list leaves no doubt as to the nature of the “crime.” It includes Michael McFaul, senior director for Russia policy at the Obama White House and later U.S. Ambassador in Moscow who oversaw the “compiling of memos to the State Department … on the investigation in the Magnitsky case.” It includes David Kramer, former assistant secretary of state in the George W. Bush administration, who, as president of Freedom House between 2010 and 2014, was one of the most effective advocates for the Magnitsky Act. Perhaps most tellingly, it includes Kyle Parker, now chief of staff at the Commission on Security and Cooperation in Europe, who, as the lead Russia staffer at the commission, wrote the bill that subsequently became the Magnitsky Act. Vladimir Putin has left no doubt: The biggest threat to his regime is the Magnitsky Act, which stops its beneficiaries from doing what has long become their raison d’être — stealing in Russia and spending in the West. It is time for more Western nations to adopt this law — and for the six countries that already have it to implement it with vigor and resolve.

  • Hedge-Fund Manager Bill Browder Says Putin’s Call-Out Helps His Cause

    The comments made by Russia President Vladimir Putin targeting William Browder are boosting the hedge-fund manager’s efforts to get more countries to impose sanctions on Russia. Mr. Browder, who was born in the U.S. but is a U.K. citizen, has been a thorn in Russia’s side for nearly a decade; he has spent much of that time crisscrossing the globe exposing Russian corruption and punishing Russian officials who he blamed for the 2009 death of his lawyer, Sergei Magnitsky. Starting with the U.S., Mr. Browder has successfully lobbied seven countries to pass laws invoking Mr. Magnitsky’s name that impose sanctions on Russian human-rights abusers. He said in an interview with Risk & Compliance Journal on Thursday that the comments made by Mr. Putin in Helsinki will “increase the probability” that the eight countries he is working with now — France, Germany, Holland, Sweden, Denmark, Australia, South Africa and Ukraine — will impose their own measures. The comments by Mr. Putin answer one of the key questions countries ask, which is whether these sanctions will work, he said. “It’s so important to him to not have [the sanctions] that he’s willing to bring it up in his summit with the most powerful man in the free world,” said Mr. Browder, referring to the summit between President Donald Trump and Mr. Putin. The U.S. Magnitsky Act, signed in 2012, targets human-rights abusers in Russia. The U.S. passed another law in 2016, the Global Magnitsky Act, that authorizes sanctions against human rights abusers across the world, as well as those accused of grand corruption. A U.S. Treasury Department spokesman said that Washington has put sanctions on 51 Russian and Russia-related targets under the two laws since their implementation. “Under this administration, Treasury has consistently confronted Russian activities that threaten our institutions, our interests or our allies,” the spokesman said. Lawmakers have approved of the U.S. handling of Russia sanctions targeting human-rights abuse. “The Magnitsky sanctions are clearly making an impact on Putin and his inner circle,” said Sen. Roger Wicker (R., Miss.). Mr. Browder praised the U.S. effort, saying the Magnitsky Act sanctions have been used “quite effectively” by both the Obama and Trump administrations. He said the Trump administration has added high-value targets to the Russia-only list, and that the global list is “a rogues gallery” of the corrupt and violent. “There will be huge pressure to add many more names to the list” in the wake of Mr. Putin’s remarks, he said. Mr. Putin mentioned Mr. Browder at a press conference Monday following a summit with Mr. Trump, suggesting that the U.S. could hand over Mr. Browder and other targets of Russian investigations in exchange for Moscow’s help with the U.S. special counsel’s probe. Mr. Trump initially seemed open to the idea, but the White House Thursday turned it down and the U.S. Senate unanimously rejected the Russian president’s gambit. A Russian court sentenced Mr. Browder in absentia last December to nine months in prison after convicting him of deliberate bankruptcy and tax evasion; Mr. Browder has called the trial a farce and maintains his innocence. Mr. Browder, however, is a U.K. citizen and runs Hermitage Capital Management from London. In the interview, Mr. Browder said the U.K. has rejected 12 Russian requests to interrogate or extradite him and that Interpol has rejected six Russian requests for his arrest, citing political motivation. “The world is now seeing firsthand what I’ve been experiencing for five years,” Mr. Browder said. “The level of danger is no greater or no lesser than it was over the last five years.”

  • Bill introduced to make doping in worldwide events a crime

    WASHINGTON (AP) — U.S. lawmakers introduced a bill on Tuesday that would make it a crime to use or distribute performance-enhancing drugs while competing in international sports events. The bill in the House is named after Grigory Rodchenkov, the Russian lab director who blew the whistle on Russian cheating at the Sochi Olympics. Penalties would include fines of up to $250,000 for individuals and prison sentences of up to 10 years for those who make, distribute or use banned substances at international events, such as the Olympics. U.S. and foreign athletes would be subject to the law if competing in an event that includes four or more U.S. athletes and other athletes from three or more countries, even if the event is held outside the United States. The bill cites the U.S. contribution to the World Anti-Doping Agency as justification for jurisdiction over events outside American borders. The bill also would expand the timeframe for athletes and corporate sponsors who were cheated to file lawsuits seeking damages. Other countries, including Germany, Italy and Kenya, have similar laws. U.S. authorities have long been hamstrung by limited legal options to prosecute doping cheats.

  • U.S. Lawmakers Seek to Criminalize Doping in Global Competitions

    United States lawmakers took a step on Tuesday toward criminalizing doping in international sports, introducing a bill in the House that would attach prison time to the use, manufacturing or distribution of performance-enhancing drugs in global competitions. The legislation, inspired by the Russian doping scandal, would echo the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, which makes it illegal to bribe foreign officials to gain a business advantage. The statute would be the first of its kind with global reach, empowering American prosecutors to act on doping violations abroad, and to file fraud charges of a different variety than those the Justice Department brought against top international soccer officials in 2015. Although American leagues like Major League Baseball would not be affected by the legislation, which would apply only to competitions among countries, it could apply to a league’s athletes when they participate in global events like the Ryder Cup, the Davis Cup or the World Baseball Classic. The law would establish America’s jurisdiction over international sports events, even those outside of the United States, if they include at least three other nations, with at least four American athletes participating or two American companies acting as sponsors. It would also enhance the ability of cheated athletes and corporate sponsors to seek damages, expanding the window of time during which civil lawsuits could be filed. To justify the United States’ broader jurisdiction over global competitions, the House bill invokes the United States’ contribution to the World Anti-Doping Agency, the global regulator of drugs in sports. At $2.3 million, the United States’ annual contribution is the single largest of any nation. “Doping fraud in major international competitions also effectively defrauds the United States,” the bill states. The lawmakers behind the bill were instrumental in the creation of the 2012 Magnitsky Act, which gave the government the right to freeze financial assets and impose visa restrictions on Russian nationals accused of serious human rights violations and corruption. On Tuesday, the lawmakers framed their interest in sports fraud around international relations and broader networks of crime that can accompany cheating. “Doping fraud is a crime in which big money, state assets and transnational criminals gain advantage and honest athletes and companies are defrauded,” said Sheila Jackson Lee, Democrat of Texas, who introduced the legislation on Tuesday. “This practice, some of it state-sanctioned, has the ability to undermine international relations, and is often connected to more nefarious actions by state actors.” Along with Ms. Jackson Lee, the bill was sponsored by two other congressional representatives, Michael C. Burgess, Republican of Texas, and Gwen Moore, Democrat of Wisconsin. It was put forward just as Russia prepares to host soccer’s World Cup, which starts Thursday. That sporting event will be the nation’s biggest since the 2014 Sochi Olympics, where one of the most elaborate doping ploys in history took place. The bill, the Rodchenkov Anti-Doping Act, takes its name from Dr. Grigory Rodchenkov, the chemist who ran Russia’s antidoping laboratory for 10 years before he spoke out about the state-sponsored cheating he had helped carry out — most notoriously in Sochi. At those Games, Dr. Rodchenkov said, he concealed widespread drug use among Russia’s top Olympians by tampering with more than 100 urine samples with the help of Russia’s Federal Security Service. Investigations commissioned by international sports regulators confirmed his account and concluded that Russia had cheated across competitions and years, tainting the performance of more than 1,000 athletes. In early 2017, American intelligence officials concluded that Russia’s meddling in the 2016 American election had been, in part, a form of retribution for the Olympic doping scandal, whose disclosures Russian officials blamed on the United States. Nations including Germany, France, Italy, Kenya and Spain have established criminal penalties for sports doping perpetrated within their borders. Russia, too, passed a law in 2017 that made it a crime to assist or coerce doping, though no known charges have been brought under that law to date. Under the proposed American law, criminal penalties for offenders would include a prison term of up to five years as well as fines that could stretch to $250,000 for individuals and $1 million for organizations. “We could have real change if people think they could actually go to jail for this,” said Jim Walden, a lawyer for Dr. Rodchenkov, who met with the lawmakers as they considered the issue in recent months. “I think it will have a meaningful impact on coaches and athletes if they realize they might not be able to travel outside of their country for fear of being arrested.” The legislation also authorizes civil actions for doping fraud, giving athletes who may have been cheated in competitions — as well as corporations acting as sponsors — the right to sue in federal court to recover damages from people who may have defrauded competitions. Ms. Jackson Lee cited the American runner Alysia Montaño, who placed fifth in the 800 meters at the 2012 Summer Olympics. Two Russian women who placed first and third in that race were later disqualified for doping, elevating Ms. Montaño years later. “She had rightfully finished third, which would have earned her a bronze medal,” Ms. Jackson Lee said, noting the financial benefits and sponsorships Ms. Montaño could have captured. The bill would establish a window of seven years for criminal actions and 10 years for civil lawsuits. It also seeks to protect whistle-blowers from retaliation, making it illegal to take “adverse action” against a person because he or she has disclosed information about doping fraud. Dr. Rodchenkov, who has lived in the United States since fall 2015, has been criminally charged in Russia after he publicly deconstructed the cheating he said he carried out on orders from a state minister. “While he was complicit in Russia’s past bad acts, Dr. Rodchenkov regrets his past role in Russia’s state-run doping program and seeks to atone for it by aiding the effort to clean up international sports and to curb the corruption rampant in Russia,” Ms. Jackson Lee said, calling Tuesday’s bill “an important step to stemming the tide of Russian corruption in sport and restoring confidence in international competition.”

  • Azerbaijan’s centennial celebrations mask repressive reality

    On Monday, the Republic of Azerbaijan celebrated 100 years of independence from the Russian Empire that collapsed following the Russian Revolution of 1917. When Azerbaijan proclaimed its independence on May 28, 1918 its leaders established the first democratic republic in the Muslim world—a real, if short-lived experience in democracy. In March, President Ilham Aliyev—the country’s dictator since 2003—gave voice to national pride in the centennial yet curiously grounded it in ideals he does everything to crush. “For the first time in the Muslim world,” Aliyev said, “the Azerbaijani people demonstrated that they want to live in a free society, they want to live in a society where all the rights of all the people are protected.” The people of Azerbaijan do not live in such a free society today. Just last month, Aliyev extended his rule until 2025 thanks to a rigged presidential election that lacked a single credible challenger. Since succeeding his father, who ruled Azerbaijan for more than a decade, Aliyev has systematically coopted the country’s institutions. In recent years, he removed obstacles to remaining in power for life, extended the presidential term from five to seven years, and appointed his wife as his unelected successor. The Muslim world’s first parliamentary republic today has a rubber-stamp legislature. The government systematically uses harassment, surveillance, imprisonment, and even torture to suppress political opposition. The National Assembly lacks a single parliamentarian from a major opposition party. The story is the same in the judiciary. For years, the country’s criminal justice system has punished opposition leaders, youth activists, and independent journalists with trumped-up charges of drug use, tax evasion, and “hooliganism.” Aliyev directs retribution against his opponents from behind the scenes and subsequently basks in fawning media coverage of his occasional pardons of some political prisoners. Despite these periodic releases, Azerbaijani civil society activists report that more than 140 prisoners of conscience are behind bars today. According to Reporters Without Borders (RSF), nearly a dozen of those jailed are journalists.  Aliyev’s government has taken particular aim at the free press to evade accountability. Having already harassed, coopted, or shuttered independent print, radio and TV outlets, in 2017 the government went a step further and blocked virtually all remaining major sources of independent online news. In its 2018 World Press Freedom Index, RSF ranked Azerbaijan 163rd out of 180 countries—just one spot above Iran. In September 2017, I introduced a bill in the House of Representatives that urges the Trump administration to raise and prioritize these human rights and democracy concerns in our bilateral relationship with Azerbaijan. The resolution calls on the administration to impose travel bans and asset freezes on Azerbaijani officials responsible for gross violations of internationally recognized human rights. It also recommends visa bans against violators of religious freedom, as provided for in the International Religious Freedom Act of 1998. The government of Azerbaijan wants us to overlook its human rights record because it offers itself as a security partner for the United States. It is willing to help counter transnational threats such as terrorism and supports the NATO mission in Afghanistan through troop contributions and logistical assistance. Its oil and gas pipelines that transport energy from Azerbaijan’s Caspian shores westward also further the U.S. goal of limiting Europe’s dependence on Russian energy.  Yet by failing to respect the basic rights and dignity of its people, Azerbaijan becomes a long-term security liability. Younger generations of Azerbaijanis have no living memory of the nation’s nearly 70 years as a Soviet socialist republic and have higher hopes and expectations for their lives. The same week that Azerbaijan held its ersatz presidential election, a youth-led, non-violent protest movement was emerging in neighboring Armenia to bring down a prime minister that embodied Armenia’s entrenched political elite. It is unlikely that Azerbaijan can hold back the tide that brought tens of thousands into the streets in Armenia in 2018 and to join Georgia’s Rose Revolution in 2003. As Azerbaijan marks 100 years of independence, the U.S. must urge the government to rediscover the state’s original democratic roots and reestablish it for a new century, rooted in respect for human rights and liberty. Whether or not the government seizes this opportunity, the United States ought to stand in solidarity with the people of Azerbaijan, whose desires for dignity and justice will not be indefinitely denied.   Smith represents New Jersey’s 4th District and is chairman of the Foreign Affairs' Africa, Global Health, Global Human Rights and International Organization Subcommittee.

  • And then, they took her cellphone

    Yesterday I received word that Pavla Holcova, a brave and unflappable Czech journalist, had been summoned by Slovakian police, who are investigating the murder of investigative journalist Jan Kuciakearlier this year. She took a 4-hour train ride from Prague to Bratislava and voluntarily presented herself at their headquarters. She has cooperated with the investigation since its earliest stages, but on this occasion, she was interrogated for eight hours. She was eventually released, but not before her cellphone was confiscated. The prosecutor who signed the order to take her cellphone and access its data is not assigned to the murder case, and he declined to explain why the authorities needed her phone. Holcova is not under any sort of criminal investigation. Quite the opposite, in fact. But Slovak authorities, acting suspiciously like the thuggish security forces found in repressive states, appear to be trying to shut her down. During the interrogation, she was repeatedly told that her reporting was “always against the system.” Not only is Slovakia a member of the European Union, until last year it ranked — along with much of Europe — as having one of the world’s freest media landscapes. Not anymore. This was merely the latest attempt by Slovakian authorities to harass the colleagues, friends and family of a reporter who was killed for doing his job. I met Holcova last week. She and I were part of a panel discussion in Washington titled “A Deadly Calling,” organized by the Helsinki Commission and designed to raise awareness for and address the assassinations of two investigative journalists in the European Union: Daphne Caruana Galizia in Malta last October, and Kuciak in Slovakia this February. The panel included Caruana Galizia’s son, Matthew — himself a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative reporter — and Holcova, who worked closely with Kuciak to report on official corruption and the Slovakian government’s ties with organized crime. It was this reporting that, many believe, prompted the murders of Kuciak and his fiancee, Martina Kusnirova. Our panel — which also included Robert Mahoney of the Committee to Protect Journalists, a watchdog group that tracks attacks on press freedom — offered an unvarnished look at the rising threats to freedom of expression around the world. In Slovakia, the Kuciak case represents a fundamental test of a young democracy. There has been a major public backlash there, with tens of thousands of ordinary citizens joining street protests demanding justice for the killings. Several high-level resignations have resulted, with the most notable casualty being Prime Minister Robert Fico. Holcova believes there is reason to hope that justice will prevail, and that reform and the rooting out of corruption are possible. But she remains skeptical. “Even though the changes made in the government are rather cosmetic,” she told me. “The most influential government members were replaced by people from the very same political party.” Less visible to the public, though, are the lasting scars these attacks have on loved ones of the slain journalists and the ongoing attempts to deter them from seeking justice. Holcova says she is lucky in that she has a strong support network of friends and family, “but sometimes I feel I might be indeed ‘toxic’ and I am afraid someone might get hurt because of me. This potential guilt is painful and even sometimes paralyzing.” That’s a familiar feeling to many journalists operating in authoritarian societies or scrutinizing high-level corruption. But this isn’t a situation we should tolerate in silence. Impressively, Holcova says she remains undeterred. I asked whether she had ever thought about giving up the effort to find her friend’s killers. “Yes, sure. I will stop pursuing this case, when the people really involved (not just the proxies) will be brought to justice.” Incidentally, this interview was conducted entirely by email. Why? Because Slovakian authorities still have Holcova’s phone, and have offered no indication of when they plan to return it. The public shaming of governments — especially fragile ones — for their bad behavior is one of the best tools available in places where the rule of law has not been completely eviscerated. Slovakia is one of those countries hanging in the balance. We should do all we can to support their struggle to mature into a viable democracy with a strong future. Officials there, Holcova wrote, “did not care that much in past. But I believe they do now. At least a bit more. The reputation of Slovak government is very much damaged, the trust in state institutions such as police or prosecutors is very low.” There’s one very simple way the Slovakian authorities can begin to repair their image. They should return Pavla Holcova’s cellphone immediately.

  • A Crisis in Guatemala, Abetted by the U.N.

    In the struggle to defeat transnational crime in Central America, the U.S. is financing a United Nations prosecutorial body in Guatemala. Yet these U.N. prosecutors are thumbing their noses at the rule of law and seem to be using their power to politicize the Guatemalan judiciary. This is dividing and destabilizing a pivotal democracy in the region. The fragile Guatemalan state is in the crosshairs of Venezuelan dictator Nicolás Maduro and Cuba’s Gen. Raúl Castro. If their allies seize control of Mexico’s southern neighbor via its institutions, as Daniel Ortega has done in Nicaragua, it will have implications for Mexican and American security. The U.N. body, known as the International Commission Against Impunity in Guatemala (CICIG by its Spanish initials), has been in the country since 2007. It has busted some criminals. But its unchecked power has led to abuse, and this should concern U.S. backers. Some of CICIG’s most vociferous defenders hail from Guatemala’s extreme left, which eschews equality under the law and representative democracy. CICIG’s rogue justice has come to the attention of Sen. Roger Wicker (R., Miss.), chairman of the Commission on Security and Cooperation in Europe, also known as the Helsinki Commission. He has scheduled a hearing April 27 to review CICIG’s role in the Guatemalan prosecution and extralegal conviction of a Russian family on the run from Vladimir Putin’s mafia. As I detailed in March 26 and April 19 Americas columns, Igor and Irina Bitkov, and their daughter Anastasia, fled persecution in Russia and became victims of a crime syndicate in Guatemala that was selling false identity documents. Yet Guatemala and CICIG tried the family alongside members of the crime ring that tricked them. They were convicted and given unusually harsh sentences. Guatemalan law and the U.N.’s Palermo Convention say that such migrants are victims, and a Guatemalan constitutional appeals court ruled that the Bitkovs committed no crime. CICIG and Guatemalan prosecutors ignored that ruling, went to a lower court and got a conviction. CICIG will not say why, or why it didn’t prosecute the law firm that solicited the fake documents given to the Bitkovs. Matías Ponce is “head of communications” for CICIG but there is no contact information for him or his office on the CICIG website. I managed to get his cellphone number from a third party and, after repeated tries, made contact with him. I requested his email and wrote to him so I could share with readers CICIG’s explanation of what appears to be abuse of power. He sent me a boilerplate response about CICIG’s work against criminal networks but no answers to my questions. It is unlikely CICIG will answer questions before the Helsinki Commission. Its co-chairman, Rep. Chris Smith (R., N.J.), invited CICIG to appear at a similar hearing he proposed for April 24 in the House Foreign Affairs subcommittee monitoring human rights and U.N. entities. CICIG declined the invitation. That hearing was not scheduled, though the office of Foreign Affairs Chairman Ed Royce (R., Calif.) told me it’s not dead. If CICIG refuses to cooperate with the Helsinki Commission, it will fuel the feeling among rule-of-law advocates that it has something to hide. CICIG says it is in Guatemala merely to “support” the attorney general in her work “identifying and dismantling” criminal networks and is not involved in politics. But an academic analysis of CICIG by Jonatán Lemus, a Francisco Marroquín University political science professor, suggests otherwise. Mr. Lemus observes that “CICIG has also been criticized for the very same reasons others have praised it: becoming a player in judicial appointments, proposing some controversial reforms to the Guatemalan constitution, and the use of televised conferences to shift the public in its favor. From this perspective, instead of strengthening Guatemalan institutions, the Commission is making national institutions dependent on its assistance.” This dependence drives CICIG deeper into politics. As Mr. Lemus notes, “once immersed in a polarized political system,” an international body designed like CICIG naturally “will face incentives to behave as any domestic bureaucracy trying to maximize its power and resources to ensure its survival.” Without an explanation for the bizarre Bitkov convictions, Guatemalans are left to speculate about CICIG’s motives. Incompetence is one possibility. But once the injustice was publicized and not corrected, that reasoning collapsed. A foreign businessman also makes an easy target for a politically correct prosecutor seeking approval from anticapitalist nongovernmental organizations. Kremlin “influence” cannot be ruled out. Nailing the Bitkovs was a priority for Russia because the family had refused to “donate” large sums to the Putin kitty in Kaliningrad. It would hardly be surprising to learn that Moscow leaned on prosecutors and judges to put the family behind bars. There’s no doubt that something fishy went on, and CICIG prosecutor Iván Velásquez’s unwillingness to address it is troubling. The truth matters for the family, for Guatemala and for the U.S.

  • Turkey Wants to Veto Civil Society Organizations at the OSCE

    A September meeting of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe is being held up by Turkey, which wants to be able to stop specific civil society groups from participating in the annual event. Each September, civil society organizations from OSCE member states meet with government representatives for Europe’s largest human rights conference, the Human Dimension Implementation Meeting. For many civil society organizations, the event is the lone opportunity they have to address government representatives. But if Turkey gets its way, those civil society organizations won’t include groups affiliated with Fethullah Gulen, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s onetime ally and current foe. Erdogan blames Gulen for the 2016 failed coup attempt and claims that groups affiliated with his movement are part of terrorist organizations. The Turkish government’s demand for a veto over civil society organizations’ participation has some worried that Ankara will weaken a critical event in the human rights community — and set an example for other countries in the process. Last September, the Turkish delegation stormed out after an opening speech to oppose participation of the Gulen-affiliated Journalists and Writers Foundation. “This entity is so closely linked to the Fethullahist Terror Organization,” said Rauf Engin Soysal, the Turkish ambassador to the OSCE. Earlier that year, Turkey managed to rid the group of its consultative status at the U.N. Economic and Social Council over a technicality. Though the group lost its consultative status at the U.N., it still came to September’s OSCE meeting. A representative for the Journalists and Writers Foundation says the organization was not given a chance to reply to claims it is a terrorist organization. “Of course because this is an allegation without any proof and a groundless claim,” the representative says. In the fall of 2017, Turkey, which can block the dates and agenda of the Human Dimension Meeting, attempted to establish a veto over which civil society organizations could join the event. A working group that was set up last fall to deal with the issue is expected to meet Friday. In January, U.S. Sens. Roger Wicker and Ben Cardin wrote to Assistant Secretary of State Wess Mitchell expressing concerns about countries calling for a “vetting” mechanism for civil society organizations, specifically citing Turkey. “Turkey’s attempt to limit civil society participation at the OSCE rejects its commitment to promote freedom as a NATO ally. The State Department is right to join the Commission in opposition to these actions,” Wicker wrote in a comment to Foreign Policy. There may not be an easy solution, however. “Everything is based on consensus decisions made by the participating states,” a spokesperson for the OSCE’s Office of Democratic Institutions and Human Rights says. And Turkey appears to be standing firm in its position. Turkey recognizes the importance of the OSCE’s work and is not opposed to groups that are critical, Behic Hatipoglu, a counselor for the Turkish Foreign Ministry, wrote in response to questions. “However, participation of terror affiliated organizations to the OSCE activities is another issue and we believe that OSCE platforms should not be abused by terrorist or terrorist affiliated organizations,” he wrote. Beyond the September meeting, some NGOs and government officials alike are concerned that Turkey might inspire other countries — Kyrgyzstan or Azerbaijan, for example — to take similar measures to keep civil society organizations away from the table. But there are also concerns that this is part of a larger pattern of Turkish behavior on the international stage. Erdogan recently called for snap elections, which will take place under the state of emergency, and civil society groups have been a frequent government target. “They aren’t worried about attracting negative attention. If anything, they like it. It shows they’re proactive,” says David Phillips, the director of the program on peace-building and rights at Columbia University’s Institute for the Study of Human Rights. “This is all part of an effort by Erdogan to show voters he’s not allowing foreigners to interfere in Turkey’s domestic affairs.” And though the current Turkish initiative is focused on Gulen-affiliated groups, Phillips believes it’s part of a broader effort, at home and abroad, to go after civil society. “I would suspect that their efforts are not restricted only to Gulen-related groups. Once you start restricting civil liberties, why stop with the Gulen groups?”

  • Use Magnitsky Act to Fight Russian Thuggery

    In “Kremlin Revenge in Guatemala” (Americas, March 26) Mary Anastasia O’Grady rightly draws attention to the determination of Vladimir Putin’s cronies to hurt those who defy their corruption. The yearslong ordeal of the Bitkov family—their harassment, persecution and ultimate imprisonment in a Guatemalan jail after fleeing Russia—is astonishing because of its cruelty. However, the story also reveals a much larger truth about the global web of complicity that the Kremlin will weave to suppress the rule of law and human rights outside its own borders. As chairman and former chairman of the U.S. Helsinki Commission, which works to advance international human rights, we are encouraged by the release of the first-ever sanctions list under the Global Magnitsky Act late last year. We ask that the administration put those responsible for the harm done to the Bitkovs on this list. These individuals should be held accountable for the flagrant torture and oppression they have inflicted upon this family, once at the helm of a thriving paper-mill company and now unjustly sentenced to years in a Guatemalan jail. Russia’s message of intimidation to the Bitkovs is a familiar one. We’ve seen before what the kleptocracy will do to those who challenge its crimes. We know the stories of Mikhail Khodorkovsky and Sergei Magnitsky. In 2012, we championed the Magnitsky Act for the wrongful punishment and death of Magnitsky, who uncovered massive fraud at the hands of Russian authorities. Under the law, those who were complicit in his death would have their U.S. assets frozen and any travel to the U.S. denied. The Global Magnitsky Act, passed four years later, broadens America’s response to human-rights offenders around the world. We have refused to respond to these stories with silence, and we cannot tolerate impunity now. Sen. Roger Wicker (R., Miss.) Sen. Ben Cardin (D., Md.)

  • Could U.S. Law Help Punish Russians for Doping Scheme?

    WASHINGTON — In recent months, the United States has punished the following people for alleged human rights violations and corruption: A former Gambian president who led terror and assassination squads. A Chechen leader involved in torture, kidnapping and murder. A Pakistani man at the center of a human-organ trafficking network. And a former Russian sports minister who was implicated in a nation’s systematic doping scheme that tainted several Olympics and other international competitions? Well, not the last person — at least not yet. The United States Anti-Doping Agency is exploring the use of government sanctions to punish Russian officials involved in the state-supported doping program that turned the 2014 Sochi Games into a sham. On Tuesday, Travis Tygart, the chief executive of the agency, attended a workshop here sponsored by the U.S. Helsinki Commission to see if the Global Magnitsky Act, a 2016 law that allows the sanctions, could apply to the Russians. The law calls for individuals who have committed human rights violations or significant corruption to be barred from obtaining United States visas and blocked from using the American financial system, which effectively blacklists them from doing business with major world banks. Powerful, wealthy people don’t like to have their assets frozen. “What happened in Sochi was the worst case of corruption that we’ve ever seen in sport, so why shouldn’t the act apply to us?” Tygart said. “We have to look down every avenue if we’re working for clean athletes, particularly in light of the I.O.C.’s failure do anything.” Tygart said American athletes have been demanding that the antidoping agency find ways to better protect clean athletes in the future so the Russian doping debacle is never repeated. The International Olympic Committee punished Russia, sort of, for its widespread doping. It barred the Russian Olympic Committee, the Russian flag and the Russian national anthem from last month’s Pyeongchang Games, while letting some Russian athletes compete under a neutral flag. It also barred for life one top Russian official: Vitaly Mutko. (He was implicated in the doping program as the Russian sports minister. After the scheme was exposed, he was promoted to deputy prime minister.) Three days after the Pyeongchang Games ended, the I.O.C. reinstated Russia’s Olympic committee — even though two Russian athletes had failed drug tests during the competition. So the United States antidoping group is looking for additional ways to punish the Russians. The Global Magnitsky Act is in its infancy and the sports angle might be a long-shot, but why not try? Besides, the United States government often has to do the dirty work for sports leagues and federations that refuse to police themselves. To take down the principles and athletes involved in the Bay Area Laboratory Co-Operative steroids scandal that ensnared athletes like Barry Bonds and Marion Jones, law enforcement made arrests and prosecutors took it from there. To address the widespread doping problem in Major League Baseball, Congress had to drag players and management in to testify. To uncover corruption in FIFA, United States prosecutors took the lead and indicted more than two dozen officials and businessmen from all over the world — much to the dismay of soccer’s global establishment. And now it could be the Global Magnitsky Act that delivers a staggering blow to the Russians for corrupting the results of major global sports competitions — including, but certainly not limited to, the Olympics. Among the people who could be targeted for sanctions are Mutko; Yuri D. Nagornykh, the former deputy sports minister; Irina Rodionova, the former deputy director of the Center for Sports Preparation; and others mentioned in an affidavit by Dr. Grigory Rodchenkov, Russia’s former longtime antidoping laboratory chief who blew the whistle on the whole operation. Does such sports corruption rise to the level covered by the law? William F. Browder thinks so. He’s a prominent investor who worked with Congress on the original Magnitsky Act, which was passed in 2012 in response to the death of Browder’s Russian lawyer, Sergei L. Magnitsky. The lawyer had uncovered a $230 million tax-theft scheme before he was arrested and died in prison. “There’s one important issue and that’s the doping scandal at the Sochi Games led to what I believe were murders,” Browder said, referring to two officials from Russia’s antidoping agency who died within two weeks of each other in 2016. “There were a number of people involved who died very suspiciously who were most likely liquidated to cover up a crime.” He added: “There were people who effectively ruined institution of sport and have committed crimes to do so. That would reach the standard of Global Magnitsky, in my opinion. These people involved in sports doping, they’re shameless. So there needs to be really hard consequences. They need to pay a very dear price.” That price would be losing access to their money and the freedom to move about the world. And they would be on a list with some of the world’s worst criminals. “If the Olympic Games are unquestionably tainted, that has huge economic ramifications for not just U.S. athletes, but for U.S. industry, and the U.S. government has an interest in making sure that doesn’t happen,” said Robert G. Berschinski, senior vice president for policy at Human Rights First and a former deputy assistant secretary of state. I asked him if he thought the individuals involved in the Russian doping case could be sanctioned under the law. “Without getting into specifics,” he said, “it seems that you can make a case.” Tygart thinks so, too. He left the workshop on Tuesday thinking that sanctions were a last resort but “a viable option.” Is it truly a viable option, and will the antidoping agency act on it? A certain group of Russians might not be eager to learn the answers.

  • Attorney for Russian ‘Icarus’ Whistleblower Blasts Olympic Anti-Doping Effort

    WASHINGTON—The attorney for the Russian whistleblower featured in Bryan Fogel’s Oscar-nominated movie “Icarus” is blasting the International Olympic Committee for not taking harsher measures against Russia for the state-sanctioned use of performance enhancing drugs by its athletes. Jim Walden, the attorney for Grigory Rodchenkov, who is at the center of “Icarus,” spoke to the Helsinki Commission on Capitol Hill and said the IOC’s ban on Russian participation in the recent Winter Olympics was “hardly a slap on the wrist.” “In reality, it was a PR stunt—a sham,” he said last week. “After all, Russia has now fielded one of its largest teams at the ongoing Olympics in Pyeongchang. They are permitted to compete not as neutral athletes but in uniforms bearing Russia’s name.” Rodchenkov served as the director of the Moscow Anti-Doping Center, tasked with ensuring compliance with the World Anti-Doping Agency. In fact, he was “ordered by his Kremlin bosses” to assist in “an elaborate system to allow Russia’s athletes to cheat in international competitions, including the Olympics,” Walden said. In the movie, Rodchenkov works with Fogel on his effort to use performance enhancing drugs as a way to show how Lance Armstrong evaded detection for so long. But, as “Icarus” unfolds, Rodchenkov becomes the center of the anti-doping scandal. Rodchenkov is now in hiding in the United States, given the threats from Russia, which has denied the claims. “Russian officials have harassed his family, confiscated his property, and even declared that he should be ‘shot as Stalin would have done,'” Walden said in his testimony. “To discredit Dr. Rodchenkov, even Russian President Vladimir Putin has gotten in the game, accusing the FBI of ‘drugging’ Dr. Rodchenkov to elicit false testimony while, at the same time, calling Dr. Rodchenkov an ‘imbecile’ and ‘mentally unstable.'” Rodchenkov was sued for defamation last week in New York by a group of Russian athletes, in a lawsuit that is being backed by Mikhail D. Prokhorov, who owns the Brooklyn Nets, the New York Times reported. “The IOC has stood by and watched this abhorrent conduct against its main witness without taking any action at all,” Walden said in his appearance before the commission. “Did this embolden Russia? You tell me. Russia reacted by also retaliating directly against the IOC and WADA. They hacked the IOC’s and WADA’s computers, disclosed confidential documents, and even threatened to bring sanctions against IOC members and WADA executives.” He continued, “No one can seriously argue that this cowardly and ineffective response by the IOC is appropriate, will deter future cheating, or is fair to clean athletes, Olympic sponsors, or fans. No one can seriously argue that the IOC’s self-policing system works at all.” Walden called on Congress to pass legislation to add criminal penalties for doping. He said a statute could be similar to the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, which sanctions foreign government officials for actions that impact U.S. businesses. The commission is an independent agency that includes members of the House and the Senate, and it monitors human rights and international cooperation in Europe. A spokesman for the IOC did not return a request for comment.

  • Bill Browder, Putin Enemy No. 1

    The harrowing tale of Bill Browder—how an American-born businessman became an enemy of the Russian state, how he has to live in constant fear, never knowing if the long arm of the Kremlin will snatch him, or kill him—is its own kind of daily terror. But what Browder’s story tells us about the way Vladimir Putin operates, and what he might want from this country, should scare us all. William Browder took his family on vacation in July, though he won't say where because that is one of those extraneous bits of personal information that could, in a roundabout way, get him bundled off to a Siberian prison or, possibly, killed. For eight years, he's been jamming up the gears of Vladimir Putin's kleptocratic machine, a job that seems to often end in jail or death, both of which he'd very much like to avoid. He'll concede, at least, that his leisure travels took him from London, where he lives, through Chicago, where he changed planes. As he walked through a terminal at O'Hare, he got a call from a New York Times reporter named Jo Becker. "Do you know anything," she asked, "about a Russian lawyer named Natalia Veselnitskaya?" Browder stopped short. "Yes," he said. "I know a lot about her." One of the most important things he knew was that Veselnitskaya had spent many dollars and many hours trying to convince Washington that Browder is a criminal. More than a decade ago, Browder was the largest individual foreign investor in Russia, managing billions in his hedge fund. Then, in 2009, one of his attorneys was tortured to death in a Moscow jail after exposing a massive tax fraud committed by Russian gangsters. His name was Sergei Magnitsky, and Browder has spent the years since trying to hold accountable anyone connected to Sergei's death. The most significant way is through the Sergei Magnitsky Rule of Law Accountability Act, a 2012 U.S. law that freezes the assets and cripples the travel of specific Russians, many of whom have allegedly laundered millions of dollars in the West. The Kremlin hates that law. Putin's hold on power requires the loyalty of dozens of wealthy oligarchs and thousands of complicit functionaries, and their loyalty, in turn, requires Putin to protect the cash they've stashed overseas. Putin hates the law so much that he retaliated by banning Americans from adopting Russian children—yes, by holding orphans hostage—and has said that overturning the Magnitsky Act is a top priority. That's where Veselnitskaya comes in. As a lawyer, she represented a Russian businessman trying to recover $14 million frozen by the Magnitsky Act. More important, she was involved in an extensive 2016 lobbying and public-relations campaign to weaken or eliminate the act, in large part by recasting Browder as a villain who conned Congress into passing it. That was not empty political spin for an American audience: The Russians really do want Browder in prison. In 2013, a Russian court convicted him in absentia (and Sergei in his grave) of the very crime Sergei uncovered and sentenced Browder to nine years in prison. Later, it got worse. In April 2016, Russian authorities accused Browder of murdering Sergei—that is, of killing the person on whose behalf Browder had been crusading, and who the Russians for seven years had insisted was not, in fact, murdered. The campaign was oafish yet persistent enough that Browder thought it wise to compile a 26-page presentation on the people behind it. Veselnitskaya appears on five of those pages. "I've been trying to get someone to write this goddamned story," Browder told Becker on July 8. "She's not just some private lawyer. She's a tool of the Russian government." But why, Browder wanted to know, was Becker suddenly interested? "I can't tell you," she said. "But I think you'll be interested in a few hours." Browder flew off to the place he won't name, switched on his phone, and scrolled to the Times website. He drew in a sharp breath. He exhaled. F***. Donald Trump Jr. told the Times that the June 9, 2016, meeting had been about adoptions, which demonstrated either how out of his depth he was or how stupid he thought reporters were. If Veselnitskaya had been talking about adoption, she of course had been talking about the Magnitsky Act. Which meant she'd also been talking about Bill Browder. He read the story again, closely. Browder wasn't sure what the implications were. But if he'd known about it in real time—that the staff of a major-party presidential candidate was listening intently to those who accuse him of murder and want him extradited and imprisoned—he would have been terrified. "Putin kills people," Browder said to me one afternoon this autumn. "That's a known fact. But Putin likes to pretend that he doesn't kill people. So he tends to kill people he can get away with killing." Browder did not say this as if it were a revelation. (And technically it's an allegation that Putin has people killed, albeit one so thoroughly supported by evidence and circumstance that no one credibly disputes it.) Rather, he told me that by way of explaining why he was telling me anything at all: The more often and publicly he tells the story of Sergei Magnitsky, the less likely he'll be to get poisoned or shot or tossed out a window, which has happened to a number of Putin's critics. If anything does happen to him, he reasons, the list of suspects would be short. He spoke softly, methodically, though with great efficiency; not scripted, but well practiced. We were in the conference room of his offices in London. Afternoon light washed through a wall of windows, threw bright highlights onto his scalp, sparked off the frame of his glasses. Browder is 53 years old, medium build, medium height, medium demeanor, and was wearing a medium-blue suit. He does not look like a threat to Russian national security, which the Kremlin declared him to be 12 years ago. Still, there is a hint of steel, something hard and sharp beneath all of the mediumness; if he confessed that he'd served in the Special Forces, it would be a little surprising but not shocking. It was late September, and Donald Trump had been president for 248 days. In the weeks after the election, Browder was "worried and confused." Trump has a creepy habit of praising Putin, but he'd also surrounded himself with Russia hard-liners like General James Mattis, Nikki Haley, and Mike Pompeo—secretary of defense, ambassador to the United Nations, and director of the CIA, respectively. Browder war-gamed the Magnitsky Act but didn't see any way that Trump could kill it—Congress would have to repeal the law—only a chance that he might refuse to add more names to the target list. (Five people were added to the list last January, bringing the total to 44.) He figured the same was true with the Global Magnitsky Human Rights Accountability Act, which President Obama signed shortly before leaving office, expanding the targeted-sanctions tool to human-rights abusers worldwide. The Russians hate that law, too, because having "Magnitsky" in the title reminds the entire planet where the standard was set and by whom. The first months of the new administration unspooled, spring into summer. Trump's flirtation with Putin persisted, but with no practical effect. "The Russians got nothing," Browder said. Congress, in fact, imposed its own sanctions on Russia for meddling in the 2016 election, cutting Trump out of the loop entirely. "I watch this like a hawk," Browder said, "and so far they've gotten nothing. There's not a single piece of Russian policy that's gone Putin's way." But then, in July, the Times reported that Veselnitskaya had met with Trump Jr., Jared Kushner, and Paul Manafort, Trump's campaign manager at the time, in June 2016. That shifted the calculus. "America has been my staunchest ally," Browder said. "It wasn't an assumption but a question: Had they flipped my biggest ally?" That was still an open question when we met in London. Much more had been reported about Trump and Russia. Other contacts and communications were known, and details kept evolving, an endless, sloppy churn of information. There was more, too, about the meeting with Veselnitskaya, which happened two weeks after Trump secured the nomination: It was attended by eight people in all, including Rinat Akhmetshin, who is usually described as a former Russian military-intelligence officer, though that generously assumes that any Russian spook is ever fully retired from the spy game. Browder has another PowerPoint presentation on him. Additionally, Manafort's notes on the meeting reportedly mentioned Browder by name. This is all bad. "They were in a meeting to discuss Bill Browder, the Magnitsky Act, and how to get the Magnitsky Act repealed," he said. "Now, what [the Russians] were offering in return, we don't know. But if it had just been a courtesy meeting, only one of [the Trump team] would have showed up." Maybe no one will ever know what, if anything, the Russians offered. But there's no doubt what they wanted, and how badly. In a four-page memo prepared for the meeting by Veselnitskaya (and later obtained by Foreign Policy), the Magnitsky Act was inspired by "a fugitive criminal" who ripped off the Russian treasury and then went on a worldwide publicity tour to, apparently, cover it up. "Using the grief of the family of Magnitsky to his own advantage, Browder exposes them as a human shield to distract attention from the details of his own crime," she wrote. Passage of the Magnitsky Act, moreover, marked "the beginning of a new round of the Cold War." That is an assertion as grandiose as it is belligerent. And yet it is not wholly inaccurate. To understand why the Kremlin is so perturbed, it helps to understand Bill Browder. In many ways, he is the Rosetta Stone for decoding the curious relationship between the Trumps and the Russians. Browder's grandfather Earl was a communist. He started as a union organizer in Kansas and spent some time in the Soviet Union in the 1920s, where he married a Jewish intellectual and had the first of his three sons, Felix. The family moved to Yonkers in 1932, where Earl became secretary general of the Communist Party USA. He ran for president twice, in 1936 and 1940, and Time magazine put him on its cover in 1938 above the headline COMRADE EARL BROWDER. His fortunes fell in 1941, when he was convicted of passport fraud. His four-year sentence was commuted after 14 months, and he was released into relative obscurity until the 1950s, when he was harassed by the House Un-American Activities Committee. Bill's grandmother steered her boys away from politics and toward academics, in which they wildly overachieved. Felix enrolled at M.I.T. at the age of 16, graduated in two years, and had a Princeton Ph.D. in math when he was 20. He met his wife, Eva, at M.I.T., a Jewish girl who'd fled Vienna ahead of the Nazis and spent her teenage years in a tenement with her impoverished mother. Felix and Eva had two boys. Their first, Thomas, took after his father: University of Chicago at 15, doctoral student in physics at 19. Their second, Bill, did not. He liked to ski and smoke and drink. He got kicked out of a second-tier boarding school and barely got into the University of Colorado, which was fine with him because it was a notorious party school. By his account, he spent his formative years rebelling against everything his leftist-intellectual family held sacred. "Rejecting school was a good start, but if I really wanted to upset my parents, then I would have to come up with something else," he wrote in his 2015 book, Red Notice: A True Story of High Finance, Murder, and One Man's Fight for Justice. "Then, toward the end of high school, it hit me. I would put on a suit and tie and become a capitalist. Nothing would piss off my family more than that." He started studying, transferred to the University of Chicago, got into a two-year pre-MBA program at Bain & Company, in Boston. He parlayed that and an essay about Comrade Earl Browder—from communist to capitalist in two generations!—into a seat at Stanford. Out of genealogical curiosity, he began thinking about Eastern Europe. "If that's where my grandfather had carved out his niche," he wrote, "then maybe I could, too." He got a job with a consulting firm and moved to London in August 1989. Three months later, the Berlin Wall fell and the Soviet Union crumbled. Eastern Europe was wide open for business. His first account was consulting for a Polish bus manufacturer that was bleeding cash. It was miserable work in a miserable little city, but while he was there his translator explained the financial tables in the local newspaper. With the fall of communism, nationalized companies were being privatized and their stocks were offered at fire-sale prices: A company with $160 million in profits the previous year had a stock valuation of only $80 million. Browder invested his entire savings, $2,000, in Polish stocks. He eventually walked away with $20,000. He'd found his niche. By 1993, he was in Moscow, investing in staggeringly undervalued stocks: He invested $25 million and turned a $100 million profit. With money that good and almost no Western competition, Browder, in 1996, raised enough cash to open his own fund, Hermitage Capital. Over the next decade, Hermitage did exceptionally well. The downside, though, was that the economy wasn't transitioning from communism to capitalism so much as it was devolving into gangsterism. Corruption was endemic. A handful of oligarchs looted and swindled at their leisure. Browder countered by positioning himself as an activist shareholder; he and his staff would piece together who was ripping off what, name names, try to impose a modicum of order on a lawless system. When Vladimir Putin rose to power, Browder believed he was a reformer eager to purge the kleptocracy. In 2003, for example, Putin arrested the country's richest man, oil magnate Mikhail Khodorkovsky, charged him with fraud, and displayed him in a cage in a courtroom until his inevitable conviction. In the context of the time, many critics saw the ordeal as a capricious show trial orchestrated by an authoritarian thug. Not Browder. "I would trust Putin any day of the week," he told The Washington Post in early 2004. "It's like being in a lawless schoolyard where there's bullies running around and beating up all us little people, and then one day a big bully comes along and all the little bullies fall into line. That's what the state is supposed to be—the big bully." But Putin, he discovered, wasn't pushing for good corporate governance. He was taking over the rackets. Putin put Khodorkovsky in a cage for the same reason Vito Corleone put a horse's head in Jack Woltz's bed: to send a message. Oligarchs could steal, but they had to pay tribute. Oligarchs no longer needed to be named and shamed; they needed to be kept in line and to keep earning. At that point, an activist shareholder like Browder became an expensive nuisance. Browder was kicked out of the country on November 13, 2005. For a while, he thought the Russian bureaucracy had made a mistake by canceling his visa, confusing him with someone else, perhaps, or misfiling some paperwork. He enlisted the help of British diplomats—Browder had been a British citizen since 1998—to no avail. There had been no mistake. Browder had been declared a threat to Russian national security. Hermitage Capital remained in business, though, its office run by Browder's staff while he oversaw operations from London. But in Moscow, the pressure only increased. In June 2007, security forces raided Hermitage and the office of the law firm it employed. They carted away computers and files and, interestingly, all the corporate seals and stamps. At first, none of that made sense. But then Sergei Magnitsky, a 36-year-old Muscovite who handled tax matters for Hermitage, started digging around. He eventually discovered three of Hermitage's holding companies had been used by Russian gangsters to swindle $230 million in tax rebates. It was a straight-up robbery of the Russian treasury. The scam wasn't unheard of, except the amount was perhaps the largest such tax fraud ever uncovered in Russia. Browder and his staff reported the theft to the authorities and the media in the summer of 2008. They even named suspects, including some of the security officials who'd earlier been involved in the office raids. Nothing happened. Then, a few months later, on November 24, 2008, Sergei was arrested at his home. He was held for nearly a year in various prisons, overrun with rats and damp with sewage. According to complaints Sergei wrote, he was fed porridge infested with insects and rotten fish boiled into mush. He contracted pancreatitis and gallstones but was refused treatment. Yet he was repeatedly told he would be released if he would recant his allegations and, instead, implicate Browder as the mastermind of the tax scam. He refused every time. Almost a year after he was arrested, desperately ill, Sergei was handcuffed to a bed rail in an isolation cell. Eight guards beat him with rubber truncheons. A little more than an hour later, he was dead. Before Sergei was killed, Browder had been lobbying anyone he could think of to pressure the Russians into releasing his accountant. One of the agencies he approached in the spring of 2009 was the U.S. Helsinki Commission, an independent federal agency in Washington that monitors human rights in 57 countries, including Russia. Kyle Parker, one of the Russia experts there, wasn't interested. He knew who Browder was—the money manager who'd championed Putin, the guy who'd made the rounds of Western capitals a few years earlier trying to get his visa restored. He assumed that's what Browder was still after. "Not gonna be able to make it," he e-mailed a colleague scheduling the meeting. "Unless much has changed, I see this meeting as info only and would not support any action on our part." He eventually met with Browder, though, and he listened to the story of Sergei. Parker understood, but it didn't seem especially uncommon. "I was thinking: Why is Bill trying to suck us into a pissing match between competing criminal groups?" Parker didn't even include Sergei in a 2009 letter to Obama highlighting the commission's most pressing concerns. After Sergei had been killed, Browder went back to the Helsinki Commission. Parker told him how sorry he was. He told him that he cried when he heard Sergei was dead, that he read about it through teary eyes on the Metro, riding the Red Line home to his wife and kids. He said he was going to help. "Here you have this Russian hero almost of a literary quality in Sergei Magnitsky," Parker told me. "He wasn't a guy who went to rallies with a bullhorn and protested human-rights abuses in Chechnya. He was a bookish, middle-class Muscovite. I see Sergei metaphorically as that Chinese guy standing in front of the tanks, but with a briefcase. He provided an example for all the other Russians that not everybody goes in for the deal, not everybody is corrupt, not everybody looks the other way when people are swindled." What Browder wanted was some form of justice for Sergei, though what form that would take was unclear. He'd researched his options for months. The Russians weren't going to prosecute anyone—officially, Sergei died of heart failure. There was no international mechanism to hold Russian nationals criminally accountable in another country. "Eventually," Browder said, "it became obvious that I was going to have to come up with justice on my own." He outlined a three-pronged approach. One was media, simply getting Sergei's name and his death and the reasons for it into the public consciousness. He talked to reporters, and he produced a series of YouTube videos, short documentaries on the people allegedly involved in Sergei's death. The second was tracing the money. "They killed him for $230 million," Browder said, "and I was going to find out where that money went." It was parceled out to dozens of people, tucked away in Swiss accounts and American real estate and Panamanian banks, some of it held by proxies; part of it allegedly ended up in the account of a Russian cellist who happened to be a childhood friend of Putin's. By mining bank transfers and financial records, Browder and his staff have accounted for much of it, including $14 million allegedly laundered by a Cypriot company into Manhattan property. (The Justice Department froze those funds in 2013 but settled with the company, Prevezon, last summer for $5.9 million. Prevezon's owner, a Russian named Denis Katsyv, is represented by Natalia Veselnitskaya. The case did not allege that he had any role in Magnitsky's death.) The final prong was political. Browder had heard about an obscure regulation that allows the State Department to put visa restrictions on corrupt foreign officials. But in the spring of 2010, the Obama administration was attempting to normalize relations with Russia—a "reset," as Obama famously put it. People die horrible deaths every day, and it's terrible and it shouldn't happen. But Russia is also a large country with a significant sphere of geopolitical influence and a lot of nuclear weapons. In that context, a dead middle-class tax lawyer wasn't relevant. But what if, Parker suggested, they went to Congress? What if the legislature, rather than the administration, took action? That was also a long shot. Getting any law passed is difficult, let alone one the administration opposes. But Browder told Sergei's story to congressional committees and individual senators and congressmen, and he kept telling it until the Sergei Magnitsky Rule of Law Accountability Act was passed by both houses of Congress and signed into law 11 days before Christmas 2012. The act originally named 18 Russians, including bureaucrats implicated in the original scam; investigators Sergei had accused of being involved and getting a cut of the $230 million; jailers who tormented him; and two alleged killers. As more of the stolen money was traced, more names were added to the list. Everyone on it is banned from entering the United States and, more damaging, cut off from the American banking system. That has a ripple effect: Legitimate financial institutions all over the world monitor the Treasury Department list of sanctioned individuals and are loath to do business with anyone on it. "That's what people hate about it the most," Browder said. "It makes you a financial leper." And that matters to Putin, Browder maintains, because the Russians on the list are not independently wealthy, like, say, Bill Gates or Richard Branson. "They're dependently wealthy," he said. "They're dependent on Putin." If the deal is that corrupt Russians can keep their cash in return for their loyalty, the Magnitsky Act is an enormous thorn in Putin's side. If he can't protect anyone's pilfered money, what's the point of loyalty? Putin surely understands that, because he was so transparently rattled: Taking orphans hostage is not the reasoned reaction of a man merely annoyed. Browder initially wanted to call the law the Justice for Sergei Magnitsky Act. But Parker never took to that. "Banning some corrupt officials from coming here isn't even close to justice," he said. "But it's a legislative monument to Sergei Magnitsky until one day Russia builds a stone monument to him. Because I have no doubt he'll be seen as the Russian patriot and hero that he was." Not quite three weeks after the Times broke the story of Veselnitskaya lobbying the Trump campaign to get rid of the Magnitsky Act, Browder testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee about, primarily, how Russian operatives wield influence and frame their propaganda. Eight years after he'd started targeting a handful of Russian crooks, Browder was suddenly very relevant to a much larger political storm. He flew home to London after he testified but had to return to the United States in early August. He checked in at an airline counter in Heathrow but was told there was a problem with his visa. He'd been flagged by Interpol, which had issued a red notice on him. It's basically an international arrest warrant, and it was the fourth requested by the Russians for Browder. Technically, a member nation is supposed to extradite him to the country that asked for the notice. But the British, along with other sensible Western nations, stopped taking Russia's attempts regarding Browder seriously years ago. In the end, it was only an inconvenience. But what if he'd been in, say, Finland when that notice popped up? The Finns are fine people, but they also have a 500-mile border with Russia. Would letting Browder go be worth risking an international incident with a bigger, more aggressive neighbor? He can make a reasonable case that, no, he would not be worth it. "I'm very realistic about who's coming to my defense," he said. "I am my defense." So he's careful. He avoids countries that might be friendly to Putin. Much of the Third World is out. So is Hong Kong. He'd be fine in Japan, but only if he didn't fly over Russian airspace. What if the plane has trouble and makes an emergency landing in Novosibirsk? That's where Khodorkovsky was seized and hauled off to a cage. Even in London, he's cautious. He won't talk about his family or where he lives. He varies his schedule and his route to work every day. He doesn't eat in the same restaurant twice in succession, or in any restaurant with predictable frequency; Russian agents have reputedly twice poisoned dissidents in London. He told me the British government has rebuffed at least a dozen requests to extradite him, and American intelligence has warned him that Russian agents planned to grab him off the street. Years ago, a Russian living in London came to Browder's staff with information about certain wealthy, corrupt people in Moscow. He was cagey and shifty and, at first, it seemed like he might be a Russian agent trying to plant false clues. But his information checked out and Browder learned who he really was. His name was Alexander Perepilichnyy, and he was nervous because he believed he was on a Russian hit list. On November 10, 2012, Perepilichnyy dropped dead in front of his house in Surrey. There was no obvious cause of death—no heart attack or stroke or aneurysm—and an inquest wasn't opened until last June. Perepilichnyy wasn't a well-known dissident, so no one thought to take a hard look when he died. "They got away with it," Browder said, meaning the Russians. "That's a perfect example of why you don't want to be an anonymous guy who drops dead." So Browder is deliberately not anonymous. He does not live in cloistered fear. When a car service got confused trying to pick him up for a photo shoot—definitely a way to not be anonymous—we took the Tube a few stops, then walked through Kentish Town to the studio. There was no security, just two men wandering around London. He has hobbies that he asked I not name, but none of them are solitary or sedentary. "One thing I can tell you," he said, "with the threat of death hanging over you, you live life to the fullest." He laughed a little. In this new version of his life, Browder is still most often referred to as a financier, but that's only marginally true. He gave all his investors their money back, and manages only his own now. Justice for Sergei—and aggravating Putin—is his full-time job. His staff of 11 tracks money launderers, deciphering which flunky is fronting for which oligarch, sniffing out the rest of that $230 million. He lobbies other governments to pass their own versions of the Magnitsky Act. The United Kingdom has one, as does Estonia. Lithuania is close, and Canada passed one in October. "Unconstructive political games," Putin told a Canadian interviewer immediately after, orchestrated by "the criminal activities of an entire gang led by one particular man, I believe Browder is his name." And Putin wasn't finished. A week later, Russia slipped another red notice into Interpol's system. For the second time in three months, Browder was temporarily barred from entering the U.S. It's relentless, Putin clawing at him, thrashing. "Their main objective is to get me back to Russia," he said. "And they only have to get lucky once. I have to be lucky every time." "Everything Bill's done has cost him tremendously," Parker said. "It's cost him money, restricted his personal freedom. And he didn't have to. He was out of Russia. He could have done what many did and walked away. Bad things happen, right? But here's a guy who's proven whatever he needed to prove to himself. He made his money. Now here's a way to find meaning. It's also a debt of honor." No, it's more than that. "It's penance," Browder said. Sergei Magnitsky was an ordinary Muscovite who happened to work for an American who annoyed Vladimir Putin. "Sergei was killed because of me. He was killed instead of me." He let that hang there a moment. "So, yeah, it's all penance." Sean Flynn is a GQ correspondent. This story originally appeared in the December 2017 issue with the title "Putin Enemy No.1."

  • Corruption Currents

    A daily roundup of corruption news from across the Web. We also provide a daily roundup of important risk & compliance stories via our daily newsletter, The Morning Risk Report, which readers can sign up for here. Follow us on Twitter at @WSJRisk. Bribery: A bribery case in Russia involving the country’s elite is causing a stir in the Kremlin. (NY Times) The question of what constitutes bribery is trickier than it seems. (Washington Post, GAB) The NCAA bribery scandal claimed more scalps. (AP, ESPN, 24) Cybercrime: The Dark Web’s most notorious thief was doxed. (Daily Beast) The hack of Equifax is leading to calls to change the credit-reporting industry. (NPR) Fraud: A federal judge postponed a Texas lawmaker’s fraud trial. (mySA) Money Laundering: Canadian authorities laid charges against a money-transfer firm in a case of alleged drug-linked money laundering. The firm didn’t respond to a request for comment. (Vancouver Sun) A guilty plea to a structuring charge, in which he made transactions of a certain size to avoid regulators, killed a man’s business and his wife, and the IRS won’t return his money. (Washington Post) The son of Thailand’s former premier blasted authorities for releasing photos of him answering questions about money-laundering allegations. (Bangkok Post, Reuters, Bangkok Post) Indian authorities continue bringing money-laundering cases. (Express, Telegraph) Sanctions: The U.S. State Department revoked the visa of Bill Browder after Russia sought an Interpol notice for his arrest in the death of Sergei Magnitsky. Mr. Magnitsky, however, died in Russian police custody after reporting a tax fraud while working for Mr. Browder; his death led the U.S. to pass the Magnitsky Act. (Newsweek, NPR, euronews, NY Times, Channel4) Iran’s president is cutting back on the Revolutionary Guard Corps’ power amid sanctions. Did President Donald Trump preserve the status quo on the Iran deal? (NY Times, Platts) Turkey’s banking regulator dismissed reports that the country’s financial institutions face fines for violating U.S. sanctions on Iran. (Reuters) Switzerland implemented a series of sanctions on North Korea. (Swissinfo) Terrorism Finance: Can bankers fight terrorism? (Foreign Affairs) Transparency: Panama Papers: Malta offered a $1.18 million reward for information on the person who killed a reporter investigating the leak. The EU ended its inquiry into the leak. (AP, WNYC, EuroNews) Whistleblowers: A U.K. judge sued to be included as a class of whistleblowers. (Guardian) General Anti-Corruption: The U.S. is seeking to seize assets it said were looted from disaster relief in the Philippines and placed in California. (OCWeekly) China’s anti-graft czar is about to leave the agency as Beijing puts new laws in place. The country banned its notorious interrogation technique as part of the reforms. (SCMP, SCMP, Reuters) Officials: Slovakia jailed government ministers for corruption for the first time. A fugitive former Mexican state official allegedly stole cows bought with government funds. (Bloomberg, BBC) A South African corruption investigation continues. U.K. banks were exposed, regulators say. (Guardian, Fin24, TimesLive, BBC) The Helsinki Commission fights kleptocracy. (KI) U.S. investigations into Russian meddling in the U.S. election continue, as Mr. Trump pledged to pay staffers’ legal bills. (NBC, NY Times, Washington Post) Taekwondo generated the most corruption complaints in Korean sports. (Korea Herald)  

  • Kyrgyzstan election: A historic vote, but is it fair?

    For the first time in the history of Kyrgyzstan, an elected president is due to peacefully hand over power after elections take place on Sunday. But critics say the political environment in Central Asia's "island of democracy" is deteriorating. Here's a look at the issues there - and who's likely to come out on top. Elections in Central Asia are usually easily predictable - the incumbent or the ruling party's candidate wins the vote with an overwhelming majority. But the vote in Kyrgyzstan offers a real competition and choice. Nearly 60 people applied to run in the race, 13 of whom were registered to stand. Two later dropped out. The incumbent, President Almazbek Atambayev, must leave office after six years. Under the Kyrgyz constitution, he may only serve one term. In neighbouring states, laws have often been changed to allow the incumbent to run again but this did not happen in Kyrgyzstan. President Atambayev also promised not to go for the prime minister's job in order to stay in power. Although one of the main candidates - Sooronbay Jeenbekov - is from the president's party, he is not guaranteed to win the vote. He faces a strong opponent - Omurbek Babanov, a prominent businessman and a former prime minister. Some candidates made the unusual move of endorsing their opponents after the campaign started. Experts say that they went through all the trouble of getting into the race in order to increase their political influence. They try to build a greater support base, which they use to negotiate a favourable deal with stronger candidates before pulling out of the race. Politicians can easily change sides, because it's not ideology or a political platform but their own personality that they use to appeal to the voters. Observers say that over the last couple of years the political climate in Kyrgyzstan has been deteriorating. The Helsinki Commission wrote that "the vote takes place amid mounting concerns of democratic backsliding, particularly regarding the government's treatment of political opposition, civil society and human rights defenders". President Atambayev has demonstrated increasing intolerance to criticism. The Sentyabr TV station which opposed him was closed last year for extremism, and activists say that there were blatant procedural violations during the trial. Several popular independent media outlets were sued and heavily fined for insulting the president. The government also tried to intimidate critics on social media. Security services identified Facebook users who criticised the president, and gave them warnings. Several political opponents of President Atambayev have also been sent to prison. Earlier this year, leaders of the opposition People's Parliament movement were jailed for allegedly plotting a coup. Omurbek Tekebayev, a former ally of President Atambayev who turned into a prominent critic, was sentenced to eight years in prison for corruption and fraud and subsequently barred from running for the presidency. Experts saw this case as politically motivated. The atmosphere got particularly tense following a major diplomatic spat between Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan. It started last month after a meeting between the president of neighbouring Kazakhstan, Nursultan Nazarbayev, and Mr Babanov. In an unusually harsh speech, President Atambayev accused his Kazakh counterpart of interfering in Kyrgyzstan's affairs, and warned them of worse to come. "I will speak differently if our neighbours don't come to their senses," he said. Since the beginning of the campaign, there have been numerous reports of violations by various candidates. There have been reports of people going house-to-house with a list of names and addresses and offering money to citizens if they vote for Mr Jeenbekov. Mr Babanov was also accused of vote-buying, and the Central Elections Committee issued him three warnings for violation of campaign rules. The Babanov team complained that security services were putting pressure on their candidate by recording their meetings and conversations and arresting his supporters. An influential MP, Kanatbek Isakov, was detained and charged with an attempt to organise a coup. Security services denied any political motive for the arrest, but Mr Babanov said that Mr Isakov had been arrested because he endorsed him. Despite all this, many voters feel encouraged by the fact that there are several strong candidates. In their view, this will ensure that the outcome is not rigged. "Our politicians know that the people will rise if there are serious violations, so they won't go into that," said one voter in the second city, Osh. Kyrgyzstan has experienced two major uprisings that ousted presidents in the past. And in both cases, rigged elections fuelled the protest mood.    

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