In human rights spat, Russia poised to target US adoptive parents

After the US Congress approved a bill to punish Russian officials involved in human rights abuses, Moscow is set to blacklist Americans accused of violating Russians' rights – including US parents accused of abusing adoptive children from Russia.

How do you say “tit for tat” in Russian?

Russian parliamentarians, incensed that the US Congress passed a law targeting human rights abusers in Russia, are expected to approve this week a retaliatory measure aimed at Americans who abuse the human rights of Russians.

Who might those Americans be? Russian lawmakers are zeroing in on the limited world of Americans who adopt Russian children.

Earlier this month the US Senate overwhelmingly passed the Magnitsky Act, named after Sergei Magnitsky, a Russian lawyer and whistleblower who died under mysterious circumstances in a Moscow jail in 2009 after he accused law-enforcement officials of corruption. The measure, which President Obama says he will sign, would freeze assets and ban US travel of Russian officials involved in human rights abuses.

In response, the Russian Duma has drawn up the Dima Yakovlev bill, named for a 2-year-old adopted Russian boy who died of heatstroke after being left in his Virginia family’s car in 2008. The law would blacklist Americans accused of violating the human rights of Russians or of committing crimes against Russians.

In particular, the law would include a list of Americans accused of abusing their adopted Russian children.

The Duma’s action reflects what Russia experts say is a marked uptick in Russian nationalist sentiment in recent years. The trend is reflected broadly in increasingly prickly US-Russia relations over everything from Syria to missile defense, and more specifically in the comments by Russian leaders after the Dec. 6 Senate passage of the Magnitsky Act.

Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov called the law “anti-Russian” and said parliaments like the US Congress should mind their national business and not “instruct others.” The deputy speaker of the upper house of Russia’s parliament, Svetlana Orlova, told reporters this week that Russians had for too long remained silent before the “double standards” practiced by the US toward their country, but she added that “those times are gone.”

Some children’s advocates in Russia have condemned the proposed law as a sideshow, saying it overlooks a more pressing national problem of child neglect and abuse.

But Russia appears ready to focus on standing up to the US. Even before the Dima Yakovlev legislation comes up for a vote, there are signs of a looming trade war as a result of the Magnitsky Act.

Magnitsky was actually approved as part of an action granting Russia new favorable trade relations with the US – known as “permanent normal trade relations,” or PNTR. The PNTR legislation did away with the Soviet-era Jackson-Vanik legislation, which targeted the USSR for restricting the emigration of Jews and others seeking to leave the communist bloc.

But the Magnitsky Act appears to have reverberated louder than PNTR with Russian officials, who have suddenly slapped restrictions on US imports. Last week Russian health authorities announced restrictions on imports of US pork and beef containing a particular feed additive.

US trade officials traveling to Moscow this week are expected to try to reverse the meat import restrictions – even as they gauge the depth of anti-US sentiment over the Magnitsky measure.              

You've read  of  free articles. Subscribe to continue.
Real news can be honest, hopeful, credible, constructive.
What is the Monitor difference? Tackling the tough headlines – with humanity. Listening to sources – with respect. Seeing the story that others are missing by reporting what so often gets overlooked: the values that connect us. That’s Monitor reporting – news that changes how you see the world.

Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

If you’re looking for bran muffin journalism, you can subscribe to the Monitor for $15. You’ll get the Monitor Weekly magazine, the Monitor Daily email, and unlimited access to CSMonitor.com.

QR Code to In human rights spat, Russia poised to target US adoptive parents
Read this article in
https://www.csmonitor.com/USA/Foreign-Policy/2012/1212/In-human-rights-spat-Russia-poised-to-target-US-adoptive-parents
QR Code to Subscription page
Start your subscription today
https://www.csmonitor.com/subscribe