Russia has detained Brittany Griner, a WNBA all-star, and charged her with possession of hashish oil, found in her baggage by drug sniffing dogs at a Moscow airport. She was on her way to join a Russian basketball team –– UMMC Ekaterinburg ––before their season started; she would not have been going to Russia if the WNBA paid salaries anywhere comparable to the NBA. In Russia, Griner earns four times her Phoenix Mercury salary, but only one-fortieth what LeBron James earns from the NBA annually. (Some will say –– and it’s always been perfectly legal to say really dumb things in the U.S. –– that the Biden Administration would have seen a way to get LeBron James back to the U.S. if he were caught in Russia with drugs for personal use. This ignores how cold and distant the U.S. and Russia have become since the Ukraine invasion, with the U.S. already applying historically strict sanctions on Russia; it also ignores that LeBron wouldn’t have been playing in Russia in the first place. It’s only perfectly legal gender discrimination to be paying women less for almost everything.
As of July 7, Ms. Griner pleaded guilty and asked the court for mercy; the penalty could be as much as ten years in prison. President Biden has said that the detention is unlawful, and has promised to do all in his power to get her back to the U.S. Protests against her arrest and detention have circled the globe, and yet, Russia’s actions could also be described as “perfectly legal.” But also wrong. Read on.
The NY Times excellent podcast, The Daily, has an excellent account of the moral dilemmas at the heart of the Brittany Griner’s case. In sum, it’s clear that the Kremlin is leveraging her detention into a kind of hostage situation, looking to bargain with the U.S. over the release of one or more Russians incarcerated in the U.S. In this podcast, she is correctly described as a “political pawn” on the global chessboard.
Such bargaining –– and holding hostages as “political pawns” –– is not contrary to customary international law. Iran held 52 U.S. embassy personnel hostage and citizens for 444 days, and never faced legal consequences; there were political consequences, of course, but not legal ones. Hostage holding mirrors a kind of “might makes right” perspective: it might not be right or fair, but Russia might get the U.S. to release an imprisoned arms dealer whose clients were terrorists and other malevolent actors.
The arms dealer in question, Victor Bout, is also known as “the Merchant of Death.”
There is nothing illegal about any of this, but the raw exercise of power and leverage “just because you can” is nothing new; but it will almost always be ethically wrong.