Russia’s Federation Council has approved the controversial bill that bans US citizens from adopting Russian orphans amid protests from officials.

Russia’s Federation Council has approved the controversial bill that bans US citizens from adopting Russian orphans amid protests from officials, media and public, Russia Today news website reported.

The bill, dubbed the Dima Yakovlev Law also imposes a visa ban and asset freeze on US officials who violate the rights of Russian citizens abroad, and bans the US sponsorship of NGOs that operate in Russia as well as the work of US citizens in Russian NGOs.

As the bill was passing through the Lower House, it was also amended with a provision that it can be applied to any nation that violates the rights of Russians, not just the USA.

Russia prepared the Dima Yakovlev bill as retaliation against the so-called US Magnitsky Act, named in honor of a whistle-blowing lawyer who died in jail before going on trial.

But it was the adoptions ban that has caused most protest and controversy. Critics claim the ban is targeting innocent people and that it will harm Russian orphans by depriving them of a chance to find new families. Advocates of the ban replied that it was targeting not the would be adoptive parents and children, but the US legal system that had been treating cases of cruel treatment and even manslaughter of Russian children in US families with inadmissible leniency.

Putin, however, has pledged fully support for the ban, calling the US attitude to Russian claims a ‘humiliation’ and calling for a state program that would boost domestic adoptions.

The Prime Minister and leader of parliamentary majority Dmitry Medvedev has also supported the ban and said that internal adoptions should be made a priority.

In the first move to implement this plan, the Lower House workgroup on improving the life on orphans suggested revenues from the luxury tax due to be imposed in the first half of 2013 could be used for this purpose.