Subcommittee on International Human Rights committee  Ladies and gentlemen of the committee and Mr. Chairman, thank you very much for giving me this opportunity today to tell you the story of Sergei Magnitsky in Russia. Thank you for your continued vigilance on the story. This is my third opportunity to address Parliament here in Ca

Subcommittee on International Human Rights committee  Vladimir Putin is running a system under which any time anybody presents any possible alternative to his rule, he eliminates those people. For example, a very popular young politician-activist-blogger named Alexei Navalny started to complain about government corruption and expo

Subcommittee on International Human Rights committee  The only overlap between the Magnitsky case and what's going on right now is that the Magnitsky case was an emblematic example of how Russia defies laws and goes about covering up crimes and publicly lying. Sergei Magnitsky was a Russian citizen exposing a crime against his own c

Subcommittee on International Human Rights committee  Yes.

Subcommittee on International Human Rights committee  Well, the historic response to that question—and not just in Canada but in every other country in the world—says, “Let's just not do anything about it.” That has been the historic response: let's just not do anything. As a result of that, Putin has enjoyed absolute impunity, and

Subcommittee on International Human Rights committee  We have the same question. There's an assumption you're making in that question, which is that the people who are running the country are acting in the national interest. If you change that assumption just slightly and say that the people who are running the country are kleptoc

Subcommittee on International Human Rights committee  We arrived in Ottawa just this morning, so I'm going to be meeting with the government tomorrow about this. All I can say from a predictive standpoint is that we're now in a completely different world, where nobody is trying to make nice with the Russians. Sanctions have already

Subcommittee on International Human Rights committee  The law prevents people from entering Canada, but it doesn't oblige the government.... First of all, it allows the government to prevent them if it chooses to. It doesn't oblige them to. It doesn't freeze their assets and it doesn't name their names. There are three things about

Subcommittee on International Human Rights committee  The answer is absolutely not. There is a lot of negotiating among ourselves that's going on here in the west in relation to Russia. In relation to Ukraine, I believe that the best way of dealing with the situation would be the sanctioning of all of the cabinet ministers, all of

Subcommittee on International Human Rights committee  Thank you very much.

Subcommittee on International Human Rights committee  You're absolutely right when you say that in normal countries the judiciary is the check and balance, the backstop, the way of keeping everything working. Your suspicion is also correct that the judiciary in Russia completely does not function as a normal, independent, law-applyi

Subcommittee on International Human Rights committee  The first ever trial against a dead man in the history of Russia was held in Moscow last summer.

Subcommittee on International Human Rights committee  Well, the one thing about Russia that is interesting is that it's a totally unjust system, but they're absolutely wedded to their procedure. You go to court, they present their case file in court, and you have an opportunity to look at their case file. They've pretty much damned

Subcommittee on International Human Rights committee  There has been no executive decision taken by any of the European countries. The British government, strangely, has been sort of lying by omission. They've stated on the record that the people who killed Magnitsky aren't allowed into the country. They then were asked again, on t

Subcommittee on International Human Rights committee  The way the evidence was gathered is that the authorities in Russia have a strange way of thinking that nobody from the outside is ever going to look at what they've done, so they document everything. When Sergei Magnitsky was beaten on the last night of his life, there was a pro