Public Safety committee  Thank you for inviting me. One small correction is that I'm not a doctor, but I appreciate the elevation of my status.

Public Safety committee  I am one of the people who spent the last 10 years involved in a man-to-man fight with Vladimir Putin. It originated from my advocacy for the Magnitsky act all over the world. Many of you will know me from the work I've done with many members of Parliament in Canada over this iss

Subcommittee on International Human Rights committee  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 fi

Subcommittee on International Human Rights committee  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

Subcommittee on International Human Rights committee  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 asse

Subcommittee on International Human Rights committee  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,

Subcommittee on International Human Rights committee  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 peop

Subcommittee on International Human Rights committee  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 defe

Subcommittee on International Human Rights committee  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

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

Subcommittee on International Human Rights committee  The U.S. has the legislation. The European Parliament recently did something that's very unusual for the European Parliament. They passed a resolution in which they attached their own sanctions list of 32 people involved in the Magnitsky case. The European Parliament has never

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