US blacklists are part of world-ruling scheme – Russian MP

An experienced Russian parliamentarian holds that the US is currently testing the new technique of slapping sanctions on foreign citizens without a court warrant as part of a larger project of world domination.

“This strategy is becoming part of a global manipulation system. They use it to blackmail many heads of state who have bank accounts there or who are thought to have accounts there, whose families have businesses. They tell these people straightforwardly, ‘We know all about you, do as we say or face problems,’” MP Aleksey Mitrofanov said at the Friday session of the lower house committee for mass media, which he chairs.

The Russian politician pointed out that these new methods allowed the US officials not to worry about any court decisions when pursuing their objectives. Mitrofanov also noted that in his opinion the strategy is currently being tested on Russian pop singer Grigory Leps, and not on him alone.

Grigory Leps (Lepsveridze) was blacklisted by the US treasury a few days before over alleged ties with the leaders of the Brothers’ Circle organized crime group. After this news broke the Russian Foreign Ministry officially urged the US side to stop the attempts of exterritorial application of its national legislation, adding that the sanctions against Leps were a violation of the presumption of innocence.

The Russian Foreign Ministry has reported that they had no information on Leps’s participation in the Brothers’ Circle group and added that the report was probably aimed at backing the Western myth of the so-called Russian Mafia.

Leps’s own production house refused to comment on the charges calling them “a delirium.”

Mitrofanov said in his speech in the State Duma, “They are testing this new strategy which is as follows: the American state has the right to block the accounts of any citizen in the world and declare him or her an outlaw, even without a search. No need for all these judicial curbs when they can outlaw people by simply declaring that they have connections with one mafia or other.”

To counter the situation the parliamentarian suggested that the lower house form a commission for protecting the rights of Russian citizens who find themselves in difficult situations abroad. The Russian Public Chamber could also participate in such a commission, he added. A member of the Public Chamber, lawyer Anatoly Kucherena, immediately supported this initiative.

Kucherena also said that the US campaign targeting Leps had been launched in order to blacken the singer’s reputation. He noted that from the legal point of view Grigory Leps had a full right to demand that the US law enforcers disclose to him the data they used to justify backing the sanctions.

The lawyer told the State Duma that the Russian side needed to keep up with the United States that “was ready to launch aircraft carriers to protect a single citizen of theirs.”

The Foreign Ministry plenipotentiary for Human Rights and the rule of law, Konstantin Dolgov, told the State Duma that in 1999 Russia and US signed a bilateral agreement on mutual legal assistance.

“This is a very serious agreement. It provides that if the law enforcers in one country – in this case in the US – have any claims against Russian citizens they must address competent Russian bodies and provide exhaustive information that would prove these claims,” the official explained.

Dolgov also said that in the overwhelming majority of cases the agreement was not working, especially lately. The US side chooses to apply it only if it was advantageous for them, he said.

According to the official, an even more serious problem is that Russian citizens have been arrested in third countries and extradited to the US after handover requests.

“Americans have entered bilateral agreements on extradition with most nations, but they refuse to sign such an agreement with Russia, despite our repeated proposals,” Dolgov told the Duma.

When Russians get extradited to the United States from some third countries, they very rarely face just and honest trials and bringing them back home is extremely difficult, the plenipotentiary stressed.

“The purpose of the extradition treaty is to interrupt this negative tendency,” Dolgov noted.