Foreign Affairs Committee on June 10th, 2019

[Guy Caron, NDP, Rimouski-Neigette—Témiscouata—Les Basques, QC]

Thank you very much.

I now have a quick question for Mr. Cotler.

We know about the violated rights of the LGBTQ community. How would you rate Canada's response to this specific issue?

In particular, have you seen any movement in terms of receiving refugees? I imagine that the persecution they are facing must prompt many members of this community to move abroad to protect themselves.

[Irwin Cotler]

This is a major issue for the LGBTQ community. The problem is that the members of this community are not recognized as political prisoners. Actually, they themselves are not comfortable seeking that recognition, because the persecution they are already facing could worsen if they are recognized as such. However, we can give them their recognition. It can be done through our Sergei Magnitsky law, as Mr. Kara-Murza mentioned.

In terms of this piece of legislation, I would like to briefly point out that we have imposed sanctions on 140 leaders from Venezuela, including Mr. Maduro, 17 people from Saudi Arabia and others from Sudan. As for the sanctions imposed on Russia, the most significant ones are aimed at the prosecutor general, the Minister of Justice, the Minister of the Interior, the chief of prisons and those involved in Mr. Nemtsov's assassination.

[The Chair, Liberal, Michael Levitt]

Thank you very much.

We will now move to MP Saini, please.

[Raj Saini, Liberal, Kitchener Centre, ON]

Good afternoon to you all. Thank you very much for coming.

Mr. Kara-Murza, I want to start with you. Something happened last month in Europe that a lot of people may not know about. If we go back a little bit in history, we know that the Russian Federation applied to join the Council of Europe in 1992. In 1996, that request was granted. As you're also aware, the European Court of Human Rights is the last place of recourse for those citizens in Russia who don't have recourse through their own courts, especially for politically sensitive cases. We know that in 2015, Mr. Putin signed a law allowing the Russian government to ignore rulings from the ECHR. We know that in June 2017, the Russian government stopped paying its contributions to the Council of Europe. That was a sizable amount, as you can appreciate—almost 7% of their budget.

We also know that last month, a meeting was held where 47 nations decided to allow Russia to continue on in the Council of Europe. France and Germany were two countries that were really behind that proposal. Knowing the history of what Russia has done, is this not a further setback of human rights in Russia? Also, 47 European nations have in some ways indirectly supported that.

[Vladimir Kara-Murza]

I will answer it in two different ways because there are two sides to this story. For those of us from the Russian democratic opposition and from Russian civil society, whenever we meet our western friends and counterparts, we always emphasize that it's important to differentiate between the regime and the people in Russia. The Kremlin does not equate to Russia; they are two different things. It's in that spirit that I will answer your question in two different ways.

First, I think it would be a catastrophe if Russia were to be ejected from the Council of Europe. As you said correctly, as a Russian citizen, the closest place I have to find justice is at the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg. I have that right because I'm a citizen of a Council of Europe member state.

We also have the legal protections of the European Convention on Human Rights. The Putin regime, as I don't need to tell you, is ignoring the decisions of the European court and also violating key obligations under the European convention, but that's not a reason to deprive us of them at all. As somebody who has a case before the European Court of Human Rights, I can tell you it is very important.

Many prominent opponents of the Kremlin have won their cases at the European Court of Human Rights. That includes the late Boris Nemtsov, Aleksei Navalny, Mikhail Khodorkovsky and many others, including some political prisoners like Alexey Pichugin, who has two European Court of Human Rights cases against him. That's important, first of all because nothing is permanent, and Mr. Putin and his regime are not forever. When things change, those decisions will of course be implemented.

Second, I cannot tell you how important it is to know that the law is on our side, and not because that's what we think but because there is a decision from the highest court of law in Europe telling us that is the case. Frankly, I think there could be nothing worse than ejecting Russia from the Council of Europe and leaving 140 million people without the protections of the European convention and the European Court of Human Rights.

The second part of my answer would be that I think that the decision to restore the full rights of the so-called parliamentary delegation of Russia to the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe is a very flawed decision. For many years—long before Crimea by the way—many of us have been advocating for the suspension of the voting rights of the so-called Russian delegation at the Parliamentary Assembly, not because they represent Russia but because they do not represent Russia.

Astonishingly, if you read the reports from the Council of Europe itself going back two decades, you will find that every single national election in Russia since the year 2003 has been ruled as neither free nor fair nor democratic by the Council of Europe itself. The last time we had something close to a free and fair election was in 2000, almost 20 years ago. On the one hand, the Council of Europe has said that the elections are not free or fair. On the other hand, they have accepted the results of those fake elections and those representatives “elected” in them as the bona fide representatives of the Russian people. To me there's no logic to this.

On a more specific note, in two weeks' time, the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe will hold its summer session in Strasbourg. That will be the session where the Russian delegation will most likely return and take up their seats again. That will also be the session where a parliamentarian from Lithuania, Emanuelis Zingeris, who's the Council of Europe special rapporteur on the case of Boris Nemtsov's assassination and the investigation into it, will be presenting his report on the Nemtsov case, which he has spent the last two years preparing.

The Russian delegation has refused any kind of co-operation with this report. They have forbidden him to enter the country. They have ignored his requests, his phone calls and his messages, and when he physically went to a post office and sent a letter to the Russian Parliament, the letter was returned to him with a stamp from the Russian postal office reading “unknown address.” I'm not making this up. That's going to be in the Council of Europe report.

I think that condition number one, before even talking about the return of the Russian delegation to the Council of Europe Parliamentary Assembly, will be the full and unequivocal co-operation with the Zingeris report on the Boris Nemtsov case. Unfortunately, that is not happening.

[Raj Saini, Liberal, Kitchener Centre, ON]

Thank you very much.

I will share my remaining time with MP Wrzesnewskyj.

[The Chair, Liberal, Michael Levitt]

It's just a very short amount of time.

[Borys Wrzesnewskyj, Liberal, Etobicoke Centre, ON]

Let me get right at it.

We heard three weeks ago about the slow ethnocide of the Crimean Tatars within occupied Crimea, but what many people in the west don't realize is that the Russian Federation has many autonomous republics with indigenous peoples of Russia. Today, many of those peoples, those indigenous peoples of Russia, are facing sequential arrests and lengthy prison sentences. In certain cases, some are incarcerated in psychiatric asylums. I was hoping that perhaps we could raise the issue of the arrests of those who stand up for indigenous rights of the indigenous peoples of Russia.

You previously read into the record the names of those involved in the assassination of Boris Nemtsov, but Mr. Genser made it quite clear that there's nothing worse than being arrested and being forgotten. I thought it important to read some of those names into the record. However, I'm willing to table those names because I can see that the chair is limited in the amount of time he can provide me.

So, thank you, but perhaps you can comment on the current situation of the indigenous peoples, such as those in the Republic of Tatarstan, Bashkortostan, Ingushetia, etc.

[The Chair, Liberal, Michael Levitt]

Mr. Kara-Murza, can I have just one minute of a response to that? I see that we're out of time

[Vladimir Kara-Murza]

Very quickly, you're absolutely right. There is a relatively new clause in the Russian criminal code that officially penalizes “separatist tendencies”.

If, for example, one of the Russian regions were to try to do what Putin did in Crimea in 2014, the so-called referendum, the people who would organize it would all be liable for criminal prosecution under current Russian law. And, yes, there are many people in the regions, including many representatives of Russia's indigenous ethnic groups, who are particularly prosecuted and persecuted.

I think it's also important to state that, in this sense at least, the Putin regime is an equal opportunities persecutor. If you look at the list of political prisoners in Russia, you will find representatives of many ethnic groups, many different religions, many different social walks of life. But of course still, just as in Stalin's time, numerically the largest group of them are the Russian people themselves.

[The Chair, Liberal, Michael Levitt]

Thank you very much.

With that, we shall adjourn.