The mother and widow of Sergei Magnitsky, a Russian anti-corruption activist who died in prison, have accused a Russian diplomat of lying about him to the European Parliament.
The women – Natalia Magnitskaya and Natalia Zharikova – spoke out in a letter on 25 February to the parliament’s subcommittee on human rights.
They said Konstantin Dolgov, the Russian foreign ministry’s special envoy on human rights, misled MEPs at a hearing in Brussels on 20 February when he told them Magnitsky’s relatives want him to be tried posthumously in order to clear his name.
According to a transcript of the hearing, Dolgov said: “The court cannot close the case unless the relatives, or people who represent the interests of the deceased, make it clear that they are not against the closing of the case. The relatives of Mr Magnitsky made it absolutely clear that they are against closing the case without his acquittal.”
Russian authorities accused Magnitsky, an accountant, of fraud after he exposed a scam by tax officials to embezzle hundreds of millions of euros from the Russian treasury.
He died in pre-trial detention in 2009.
But prosecutors are now re-opening the fraud case in what his family see as a smear campaign and a form of intimidation to keep them quiet.
Andrew Rettman