One of the victims of a shameful law
STANDING outside the Kremlin, Vladimir Putin, Russia’s president, appealed to his compatriots with a traditional new year’s greeting, urging them to be more “charitable”, “sensitive” and “caring for those in need”.Sincerity has never been Mr Putin’s forte, but this time his words risked being seen as a mockery of the virtues he preached. Only three days earlier, on December 28th, he signed a law that bans Russian orphans from being adopted by American families, depriving some of his most vulnerable citizens of their chance for a better life. The fact that Mr Putin signed it on the day marked by many Christian churches as the Massacre of the Innocents was a coincidence, but it added to the dark symbolism of the law, which has promptly been dubbed as “Herod’s law” and “cannibalistic”.Formally, the ban is part of the Kremlin’s response to America’s Magnitsky Act, passed by Congress in 2012, which blacklists Russian officials involved in the death of Sergei Magnitsky, a Russian lawyer, and, more broadly, those accused of rights abuses. Magnitsky, who worked for Hermitage Capital Management, a…
