Putting lawyer Magnitsky on trial posthumously amoral - mother
MOSCOW. Aug 5 (Interfax) - Natalya Magnitskaya, the mother of Hermitage Capital lawyer Sergei Magnitsky, who died in a Moscow jail in 2009, has dismissed the Russian Interior Ministry's plans to forward a tax evasion case opened against her son to court as "blasphemous."
"The Interior Ministry's attempts to try a person after his death, when he cannot defend himself, are blasphemous. It runs counter to human morality and law," Magnitskaya told Interfax on Friday.
"We demand that all those responsible for my son's death be named and put on trial," she said.
A Hermitage Capital spokesman told Interfax that a trial over the officials who arrested Magnitsky and drove him to death, as well as over those involved in the budget fraud uncovered by the lawyer, was the only possible way of rehabilitation in Magnitsky's case.
The Russian Interior Ministry's Investigative Department announced on Thursday that it was ready to send Magnitsky's case to court.
"During an additional inquiry, an investigator will have to find out the opinion of Magnitsky's relatives regarding the closure of his criminal case for the aforementioned reasons. If they object [to the closure of the criminal case], the investigation will continue and the case will then be forwarded to court, where the collected evidence will be verified comprehensively and will receive an objective assessment," a spokesman for the Interior Ministry's Investigative Department told Interfax.
However, if Magnitsky's relatives object to any further inquiry, the investigation "will have no legal grounds to think that their legal interests were violated by the decision to drop the criminal case, while claims about violations of Magnitsky's rights to rehabilitation are not supported by intentions to restore them," he said.
Magnitsky died in the Matrosskaya Tishina detention facility on November 16, 2009, at the age of 37. He had been charged with tax evasion.
Magnitsky's death drew a broad public response. The Investigations Committee opened a criminal case on charges of failure to provide assistance to a patient and negligence.