On do not mess with the rule of law in Russia. Apparently. For having neglected it, the star of women’s basketball of the United States Brittney Griner was sentenced on August 4 to nine years in prison for drug trafficking. It was about the presence in her luggage, on her arrival in February on Russian territory, where she was to play during the American off-season for the Yekaterinburg club, of a vaporizer and cartridges containing the essence of cannabis, authorized in many American states.
Russian justice being what it is, namely the zealous auxiliary of an autocracy, Brittney Griner pays above all for having been in the wrong place at the wrong time. She was arrested just before the start of the aggression of Ukraine by Russian troops, a far more dramatic breach of law, accompanied since by a dizzying number of war crimes. This invasion triggered an unprecedented series of sanctions against the Russian regime.
As Moscow recognized the day after the conviction by raising the possibility of an exchange of prisoners, the double Olympic gold medalist is, in fact, less a convict under common law than a hostage, exhibited as such by the Russian media, which insisted heavily, moreover, on her sexual orientation (she is openly homosexual). Irrefutable proof, in their eyes, of the supposed decline of the West.
Before her, a former Marine, Trevor Reed, suffered a similar fate. Accused of violence against a Russian policeman, he was swapped for an authentic drug trafficker, also Russian, sentenced in the United States to twenty years in prison. Whatever the outcome, the comparison of the crimes for which Brittney Griner is accused and those of the prisoner or prisoners whose release Moscow will seek will speak for itself.
Blackmail
Russia is, alas, not the only country to practice this policy of hostage taking, a characteristic of rogue states. Iran has also made it a detestable specialty for a long time, as evidenced by the agreement ratified in July by the Belgian Parliament, which could allow the release of an Iranian diplomat also sentenced to a prison term in Belgium for his role in a planned attack targeting a gathering in France of die-hard opponents of the Tehran regime. Brussels seems to have resigned itself to this in order to obtain the release of Western prisoners, including one threatened with execution.
This blackmail of hostages in Tehran, which particularly targets dual nationals, invariably presented as agents from abroad, the United Kingdom has also recently experienced. Just like France, which also has its share of nationals delivered to a justice under orders under false accusations. Sentenced to five years in prison for smoking against national security, the Franco-Iranian researcher Fariba Adelkhah has been detained since June 2019.
We must relentlessly denounce this practice which crushes human beings, trapped in spite of themselves in conflicts that are beyond them. State hostage-taking, far from illustrating their strength, testifies on the contrary to the cowardice of the regimes that resort to it. It makes litter of the criticisms they shower on Western democracies that are certainly imperfect, but regularly presented as kingdoms of the arbitrary. It says more about them, in fact, than the most terrible indictment.
