US throws down challenge to Moscow with Magnitsky list

The so-called Magnitsky Act and the Magnitsky List violated the fundamentals of the law and Moscow had to respond to it properly, a high-ranking Russian legislator said Monday. "This document is, in my opinion, an example of an illegal document," chairman of the State Duma, or lower house of the parliament Sergei Naryshkin told reporters. "I wonder, how the legislators of the country calling itself a law-governed state, almost the citadel of democracy, could pass such laws. They violate the basics of the law, the things every first-year law student knows," Naryshkin said, adding the publication of the list had thrown down a challenge to Russia. Therefore, Russia responded to the challenge symmetrically, he said. The United States on Friday released a list of 18 Russian officials suspected of human rights abuses under the so-called Magnitsky Act, named after a Russian lawyer who died in a Russian prison in 2009. In a tit-for-tet response, Moscow published its own list of 18 U.S. citizens who would be barred from entering Russia. Those on the Russian blacklist are U.S. citizens either involved in torturing and holding convicts for indefinite detention in the Guantanamo prison or responsible for violating rights and freedom of Russian citizens abroad, according to the Russian foreign ministry.