Trial of dead lawyer goes on

MOSCOW — A Moscow judge has refused calls to halt the posthumous prosecution of Sergei Magnitsky, ruling on the first day of the trial Friday that it was not illegal to try a dead defendant.

Magnitsky, 37, a lawyer whose case became an international cause celebre, died in a pretrial detention centre in 2009 after being arrested by Russian police officers whom he had accused of colluding with tax officials in a $218-million Cdn. fraud. He was denied vital medical treatment and beaten in custody.

In November 2012, prosecutors charged Magnitsky with tax evasion, citing a recent Russian Constitutional Court decision that suggested a dead man could be tried if his family requested it in order to clear his or her name.

Magnitsky’s widow, Natalya Zharikova, 40, said in an interview with The Daily Telegraph this week that she and his mother had repeatedly informed authorities that they did not want such a trial, making it illegal.

That view was supported Friday by the Human Rights Institute of the International Bar Association, a lawyers’ group, which issued a statement saying the posthumous trial was “unlawful and breaching both domestic and international covenants.”

However, Judge Igor Alisov turned down a request by court-appointed lawyers to investigate the legality of the trial.