In another high-profile Jewish prisoner case, Dec. 3 marked the fourth anniversary of the incarceration of Alan Gross, who is serving a 15-year prison term for helping Cuba’s Jewish community access the Internet while he was a subcontractor for the United States Agency for International Development. Gross says he was working to promote democracy but Cuba convicted him of “crimes against the state.”
Ostreicher’s freedom did not shed any light on Gross’s case in the eyes of Scott Gilbert of Gilbert LLP, the lead attorney on Gross’s legal team.
“I think that each of these cases has its own set of facts, including the country that’s holding these people, and that really helps to determine what happens,” Gilbert told JNS.
“The United States has a decades-long history of negotiating to obtain the release of Americans who’ve been held in foreign countries that we either have very diplomatic relations with or very hostile relations with.”
Gilbert said there has been “virtually no serious engagement with the Cuban government to attempt to negotiate Alan’s release” since his imprisonment.
“The Cuban government, at the highest levels, has made very clear both to use privately and publicly that they would sit down with the United States with no preconditions to discuss the conditions of Alan’s release and try to negotiate a resolution, and the United States has yet to sit down and do that,” he said.
The past 60 years of dysfunction in the U.S.-Cuba relationship “is really weighing” on Gross’s case and is “causing some of the paralysis in the administration that we’re seeing,” Gilbert believes. Asked if high-profile individuals have been involved in efforts to bring about Gross’s release, akin to Sean Penn’s advocacy for Ostreicher, Gilbert said, “Indeed, there are individuals who have significant profiles and have been involved in this, and have been talking behind the scenes with members of the administration.”
“It’s not clear to me from press reports exactly what Sean Penn did or didn’t do [for Ostreicher], but I think this is a situation where the president of the United States needs to authorize a high-level negotiation with representatives of the Cuban government to sit down and get this done,” said the attorney. “If the president would act, this is a far easier situation than dealing with Bolivia or anywhere else.”
High-profile Jewish prisoners in Russia, meanwhile, have seen positive momentum in their cases as of late. Teacher Ilya Farber, who had been sentenced to seven years in a maximum-security penal colony on bribery charges, saw his sentence reduced to three years by the Tver Region Court on Dec. 11.
Farber’s 2012 trial drew allegations of anti-Semitic overtones when a prosecutor asked, “Can a person with the last name Farber truly help a village for free?”
On Dec. 19, Russian President Vladimir Putin announced the pardoning of Mikhail Khodorkovsky, whose father is Jewish. Khodorkovsky had been incarcerated for a decade since he was arrested on fraud and tax evasion charges upon the dissolving of his Yukos oil company.
Sam Kliger, the American Jewish Committee’s (AJC) director of Russian Jewish community affairs, called the decision to pardon Khodorkovsky “a positive sign.”
“Many human rights groups, including AJC, were speaking for his release for many years,” he said.
Will Pollard, like Khodorkovsky, see a presidential pardon anytime soon? Bill Richardson sees “the glimmers of some good movement on that issue.”
“I see increased social media, Facebook, [and] Twitter [activity] on this subject, and that is read, that is something that I think is increasing momentum and has increased the potential for [Pollard’s] release,” he said.
(JNS)