MOSCOW, December 23 (Itar-Tass) — U.S. Department of State will not extend the Magnitsky list supplementing it with 400 State Duma lawmakers, who voted for the Dima Yakovlev law, the head of the State Duma foreign affairs committee, Alexei Pushkov, told Itar-Tass on Sunday.
A petition demanding that Russian State Duma lawmakers, who supported the Dima Yakovlev law, should be put on the Magnitsky list collected the required number of signatures to be considered by the U.S. administration. The petition placed on the White House website on December 21 was signed by 25,000 people in less than 48 hours.
Pushkov expressed confidence that the U.S. authorities would not agree with the arguments of those who had signed the document.
The parliamentarian emphasized that the U.S. along with Somalia are practically the only states that have no yet ratified the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child.
“Washington does not want to be regulated by international bodies in this sphere,” Pushkov said. Russia, on the contrary, is a signatory to this Convention and does not violate any international practice rules.
“The Dima Yakovlev law bans the adoptions only to Americans, but all our obligations in relation to other countries continue to be in effect,” he said.
On Friday, the lower house of Russian parliament adopted in the third and final reading the draft law in response to the United States’ Magnitsky Act banning adoptions of Russian children by U.S. citizens and called for denouncing the Russian-U.S. agreement in this sphere.
The law was supported by 420 parliamentarians, 7 voted against and one abstained.
The State Duma also approved visa and financial restrictions in relation to persons “who voted for a ban on the entry of Russian citizens to the U.S. and arrest of their assets over their involvement in violation of human rights.”
The Federation Council is expected to consider the draft law on December 26.