Subcommittee on International Human Rights Committee on April 29th, 2014

[David Sweet, Conservative, Ancaster—Dundas—Flamborough—Westdale, ON]

Thank you very much, Mr. Chair.

Mr. Browder, I think every lawyer in the world would want to have you as their friend, or someone like you, if he or she ever got into a circumstance like this. I'm not trying to make light of it; this is an absolute tragedy that has happened to Sergei Magnitsky. But your dedication is exemplary for what anybody could ever hope for from anybody, a best friend or whatever, so I want to commend you on that.

Last July it wasn't only a dead man who was on trial. It seems that your efforts must be at least a little effective, because they tried you in absentia as well. Do you want to tell us a bit about that?

[William Browder]

Yes. Just to complete the story, there were two defendants in July, Sergei Magnitsky, who is dead, and me, alive but not in Russia. It was the first posthumous trial in Russian history and the second trial against a westerner in absentia.

In the court, they have a cage for defendants. In this particular case, there was an empty cage. We didn't—neither Sergei's family nor myself—participate in the trial because it was completely trumped up. Two state-appointed lawyers showed up unwillingly. They were asked to show up, they showed up at the court, and then they asked to be excused. Their supposed clients didn't want to have any contact with them.

The government demanded that they participate; otherwise, they would have been disbarred. They basically went on with the show trial—and it was a show trial in every possible sense of the word—and convicted Sergei and me. They sentenced me to nine years in prison in absentia.

The Russians went to Interpol to try to have me put on the Interpol most wanted list. Thankfully, Interpol rejected them, because the case was, in their words, politically motivated and illegitimate. They've gone to a number of countries, including the U.K., asking them to hand me over. The U.K. has rejected this. A number of other countries have openly said that if I ever were to go there, nothing would happen.

But this is what the Russians do when they get mad at you. They open a criminal case. There's a famous saying: “Show me the man and I’ll find you the crime.” It's a Stalin quote, or maybe it's Dzerzhinsky's; I can't remember which one. That's what they do.

I clearly upset them profoundly, and it wasn't just because of the Magnitsky Act. We've also been able to trace the money that was stolen and to get different law enforcement agencies around the world to seize that money. The United States, Switzerland, Lithuania, Estonia, Latvia, Cyprus, Moldova, and various other countries have opened criminal cases. What this also has done is expose what I call the money-laundering pipe that's used by the entire criminal organization of the government.

So I'm an extremely dangerous character for them, because I've taken their dirty laundry and put it out there for the whole world to see.

[David Sweet, Conservative, Ancaster—Dundas—Flamborough—Westdale, ON]

Going back to the time when you actually began business in Russia, this obviously was how the government operated, etc. This was obviously a huge surprise to you.

Obviously your communications are strained now with any sources there, but I would think you may have some. While you were there, what was the awareness in the average individual? You must have had a lot of interactions with Russian citizens. Are they totally oblivious to this? Are they stymied by fear of the government? Have they just dealt with this for so long that it's everyday practice?

[William Browder]

The Russians are a very fatalistic people. They're highly aware of everything that goes on. They don't know the details, necessarily, but they know the general.... They can see it for themselves. They were supposed to have gotten a billion dollars to build a road, and there's no road. The hospital that was supposed to buy new machines doesn't have any machines.

Everybody knows this is going on, and they're infuriated by it. Any person who would ever run on any ticket to change the corruption, to stop it, would win in a landslide, if they were allowed to run. The Russian government does what it did to Sergei Magnitsky, though maybe not quite as extremely, but in a lot of different ways and to a lot of different people. Everybody is afraid to speak up about it. Everybody is afraid to do anything about it, so they're subjected to it.

That's what a corrupt authoritarian regime does. It scares its people. It steals, and then it scares its people away from saying anything.

[David Sweet, Conservative, Ancaster—Dundas—Flamborough—Westdale, ON]

How many cases, other than that of Sergei Magnitsky, are you trying to raise awareness of in the international community with regard to human rights violations in Russia?

[William Browder]

There are a lot of cases that are directly connected to the Magnitsky case. There was a case involving a young man named Fedor Mikheev, who was arrested by the very same police officers who arrested Sergei Magnitsky. They arrested him and then handed him over to some kidnappers, who demanded a $20-million ransom for him from his boss. His wife got involved and somehow found out where he was and got him freed by the police. He was then rearrested and sentenced to 11 years in prison. When we were making movies about our case, we included the Mikheev case.

We've discovered that Sergei discovered multiple crimes involving the same types of tax-rebate fraud, going up to one billion dollars, and we've exposed those as well. I'm actually going to be in Washington next week and introducing the young ladies from Pussy Riot to various senators there, to try to get some of the people who were involved in their persecution added to the Magnitsky list. It's a growing movement of people.

The problem in Russia is everybody's problem, so the more that this stuff overlaps with us, the more we want to get everyone else involved. Certainly we're never going to bring Sergei back, but if we can create consequences and save lives for others through his sacrifice, that would be a meaningful legacy for him.

[The Chair, Conservative, Scott Reid]

Thank you, Mr. Sweet.

With the permission of the committee, might I ask one question? Thank you.

Your mention of Pussy Riot raises something that has been mysterious to me, and perhaps you can provide the answer to it. It is not difficult to understand the financial motivation that leads to someone like Sergei Magnitsky being crushed by the system, but I am mystified by the desire of the Russian regime to crush its LGBT community. That just seems totally unconnected. I can't figure out what the motivator behind it is.

I wonder if you have any idea what the bee in their bonnet is.

[William Browder]

It's very simple. If you are Vladimir Putin, if you are a kleptocrat and are running a kleptocratic state in which everybody is furious and fuming just below the surface, and in which basically 1,000 people have benefited from everything—from all the stealing—and 140 million people haven't, yours is an unsustainable regime. You have to come up with something to create a distraction. Putin has been testing out different ideas.

One of his first ideas, which came out about a year ago, was this idea of cracking down on the LGBT community. The thought there was that if he could somehow create this sort of conservatism, it might distract people. It didn't. He tried it out and no one was paying any attention, so he moved on to plan B and plan C and plan D. I don't know exactly where Crimea fits into the lettering of these plans, but he was looking for something to create a distraction.

The attack on the LGBT community, by the way, has not stopped. It is going on. It's just that nobody is paying attention to it right now, as people are looking at Donetsk today. But many people from that community are feeling very vulnerable. People are leaving the country, and people who aren't leaving it are feeling totally at risk. They are having to hide their lifestyles in hopes that they don't end up being persecuted and losing their jobs or possibly experiencing something worse.

[The Chair, Conservative, Scott Reid]

Thank you very much. That was very helpful.

Colleagues, we're going to have to suspend for a moment to go in camera.

I'm sorry, was there someone else?

Oh, Mr. Benskin, my goodness. I owe you an apology. I would not have asked that question. I completely forgot.

With my apologies, you have six minutes.

[Tyrone Benskin, NDP, Jeanne-Le Ber, QC]

Thank you. It's not a problem.

I'm new to the committee, so I'm new to the existence of this story. There is so much happening in the world on a daily basis, and you can only read so much news. Could you elaborate a bit on the key points of the Magnitsky Act? What are the key claws or teeth in this act?

[William Browder]

The Magnitsky Act is a piece of U.S. legislation at the moment, which has three basic features: it publicly names the names of the people who are involved in human rights abuses; it bans them from entering, in the U.S. case, America; and it freezes the assets and disallows any financial institution or U.S. business to do business with the people who are on that list.

The Magnitsky Act applies in America to the people who were involved in the Magnitsky case, and it applies to people involved in other gross human rights abuses as recognized by the U.S. government.

[Tyrone Benskin, NDP, Jeanne-Le Ber, QC]

What is the burden of proof for being able to enact those asset freezes?

[William Browder]

The burden of proof is very high. The U.S. government is the ultimate arbiter of who is put on that list and who isn't. A person put on the list has the opportunity to challenge it in federal court. The government will only put a person on that list when they can defend doing so to a criminal standard based on evidence, so it is not according to a civil but to a criminal standard that they are placed on that list.

[Tyrone Benskin, NDP, Jeanne-Le Ber, QC]

In the case of what is happening now in Crimea with Russia and so forth, would there be wiggle room, taking the Magnitsky Act as a base, to use the same type of thought process on a political level by applying the same process to members of the Russian parliament or other leaders within the Russian government?

[William Browder]

This is exactly what has happened. The United States has taken the exact concept of the Magnitsky Act and applied it. At this point, I think there are something like 54 names of people who have been put on the federal OFAC sanctions list and have their visas banned and their assets frozen on the basis of a criminal standard.

The only thing that may be different between the current sanctions and the Magnitsky sanctions is that I'm not sure whether the people under the Ukrainian sanctions have the ability to go to U.S. court to challenge the designation. I haven't researched the current sanctions enough to know that. But everything else is exactly the same, effectively, sanction for sanction, word for word, and consequence for consequence.

[Tyrone Benskin, NDP, Jeanne-Le Ber, QC]

Thank you.

I will yield my time in the interests of us doing what we need to do.

[The Chair, Conservative, Scott Reid]

Thank you, Mr. Benskin. I do apologize again for overlooking the fact that it was your turn.

Colleagues, we're going to suspend for a moment.

On behalf of everyone, I will offer our thanks to Mr. Browder.

You were as informative as you always are, sir, and this is a really important issue.

Let's suspend and reconvene in camera.

[Proceedings continue in camera]