Russia slams Sweden over magnitsky list

Russian diplomats denounced the call by Swedish lawmakers for a Europe-wide blacklist of Russian officials implicated in the prison death of whistleblowing lawyer Sergei Magnitsky. The proposal is “an unfriendly step against Russia, an attempt to interfere in internal affairs of another state and a disrespect of the concept of its Judiciary’s independence,” the Russian Embassy in Stockholm said in a press release on Friday. The check into the death of Magnitsky, who died in 2009 after 11 months in pretrial detention of health problem and, allegedly, a beating by prison guards, is still ongoing, the embassy said. The “politicized initiative … has nothing to do with genuine concern about human rights” and should not be supported by the Swedish parliament, the Riksdag, or the country’s government, the embassy said. Fifty-nine of 349 Riksdag members have petitioned their government earlier to blacklist dozens of Russian officials linked to Magnitsky’s case for European Union entry and freeze their assets in Europe. A similar ban was proposed in 2010 by the U.S. Congress and is still under consideration.