Foreign Affairs Committee on March 10th, 2016

[Vladimir Kara-Murza]

Thank you very much for the question.

They certainly have had a long track record of those kinds of cases. To those that you mentioned, I'd also add Yuri Shchekochikhin. We can add Anna Politkovskaya, who, two years before she was assassinated, was also poisoned on her way to Beslan. We can add the strange case of Mr. Perepilichny, who was a whistle-blower in the Magnitsky case, and Bill can talk in more detail about this.

They certainly have had a very long track record. We know that this organization, which was called at various times different names—the NKVD, the MGB, the KGB, and now the FSB—but whose substance unfortunately has not changed because of that, has had this special lab dealing in those special types of poisons, including untraceable ones, since at least the 1930s. They certainly have a long experience in this.

I have no particular information, obviously, about who and by what means they did what they did to me. I pretty much know why, but I don't know who or how. As soon as I was able to return to Russia last year after medical rehabilitation, I submitted a request for a criminal investigation into attempted murder to the Russian investigative committee. Not surprisingly, I think, there hasn't been any movement on this.

I don't have any information other than to say that it was certainly something very sophisticated and very potent. When a healthy 33-year-old man has all of his organs fail within a few hours, I think it has to be something strong that they used. Other than that, I don't have any specific information, other than to say that those types of sophisticated poisons are usually substances that either those special services that I mentioned, or people from the special services, have access to. I think I can safely assume that this was the case with me as well.

[Borys Wrzesnewskyj, Liberal, Etobicoke Centre, ON]

Thank you.

Ms. Nemtsova, it truly is an honour to have the late Boris Nemtsov's daughter here in front of the committee. Your father was a fearless fighter for democratic rights, for human rights, and for the dignity of the Russian people. He was incorruptible. It's why he was assassinated.

We understand that because of threat and security reasons you have left Russia. Statistics also show that in the last year there's been a tenfold increase in the number of people who have left Russia. The number was approximately 300,000. What is the state of human rights in Russia at the present time?

[Zhanna Nemtsova]

Thank you very much for the question.

I don't think that I have to further describe what the state of human rights is. If everything was good, we wouldn't be here today. After what Mr. Browder and Mr. Kara-Murza described, and after the assassination of my father, the most high-profile assassination in Russian history, we understand that it's awful, and it's getting worse as more activists are put under severe pressure and are thrown into jail. In the latest case, Dadin, who was just an activist who acted according to the constitution, which guarantees the freedom of peaceful gatherings, was sentenced to a three-year term in prison because he peacefully protested in Russia. I think it's very important that there are still people—there are very few—who resist human rights abuses.

My case is very personal. Three years ago, I couldn't have imagined that I would be a human rights activist, because I thought that my father was the one who represented my interests and my family's interests in the political sphere, but when you are personally affected, it's a very devastating experience. It's what Mr. Browder experienced with Sergei Magnitsky. I think that 10 or 12 years ago he wouldn't have imagined that he would be a human rights activist.

I don't want to speak for everybody, but for me it's a very moral choice, and I think that in what I do I am right. My father thought the same, that he was right. I believe that he was right and that I am right in what I do. I think it's a question of morality, because if you're personally affected, you just cannot close your eyes. You cannot see well if you don't do anything to find justice—to find justice for my father—so for me, I think it's a moral choice.

[The Chair, Liberal, Bob Nault]

Thank you.

That's the end of the first round. Now we'll go to the second round, with Mr. Saini and then Mr. Miller.

I would like to use the chair's prerogative for one minute.

There were a number of comments made in your presentation, Mr. Kara-Murza, about other prisoners and other individuals you were speaking of who are in the same position as some of the individuals who are mentioned in this motion and/or are part of your interest in having Canada pass a very specific piece of legislation or including it in our Special Economic Measures Act.

I was curious about that and wonder if there is any information you could provide the committee, because we have not had a chance to do a significant review of the American situation as it relates to the passing of its legislation and whether it has made any difference in Russia in terms of dealing with the individuals who you say should be prosecuted and/or put in a situation where we could find out more about who's doing these atrocities in Russia. Could you give us a sense of what's going on in the U.S.?

[Vladimir Kara-Murza]

Sure. Thank you very much for the question.

The U.S. Magnitsky Act provides for a detailed process about establishing information about these human rights abuses, obviously prior to making decisions about sanctioning those individuals. Part of that process involves getting information from non-governmental organizations, including those that operate in Russia directly. I know that many of my colleagues in Russian civil society in the human rights movement and the NGO movement have taken part in this process and have submitted this information, detailed information, about specific individuals responsible for human rights abuses.

Actually, on his very last visit to Washington, which was in January 2014, Boris Nemtsov met several members of the U.S. Congress from both houses. He handed them a list that contained the names of 13 individuals with detailed information and relevant evidence and links to primary sources connected to human rights abuses.

I recall that this list included, for instance, Aleksandr Bastrykin, the head of the investigative committee, who once personally took a prominent independent journalist in Russia, Sergei Sokolov of the Novaya Gazeta, to a forest near Moscow and threatened him with murder, openly, if the newspaper continued their investigations. He told him, in a laughing manner, that he'd be the one investigating the murder, so don't worry about it, everything will be fine; nobody will ever find out, and they'll never find you.

That's what he said, and he actually admitted it. That's not just a legend. It's not something that people think; he actually admitted to this.

So he was on the list, as was Mr. Churov, who has become a symbol of election fraud in our country. He's been the chairman of the central electoral commission, and was responsible for the rigged election rounds in both 2007-08 and 2011-12. He was on the list, again with detailed, specific evidence.

This is how the U.S. process works. Unfortunately, I have to say that the implementation of the Magnitsky Act as it is done by the current U.S. administration is not, in my view, adequate to the initial goals and aims of the Magnitsky Act. This act was not intended to have a glass ceiling. It was not intended just to punish low-level abusers and violators. Of course, they also should be held responsible, there's no question about it, but it should go higher. It should include high-profile people who order these human rights abuses, who cover them up, and who use their authority to commit them. So far, frankly, among the 39 people that Bill mentioned who have been sanctioned under the Magnitsky list, there hasn't been a single high-profile senior person in the Putin regime. This is why I think the effect has been more limited than it otherwise could have been.

I'll give you a different example, not related to the Magnitsky Act, but related in the same vein of personal sanctions against people who commit these abuses. Back in 2007 you may remember there was a controversy about the relocation of a Soviet-era war memorial in Tallinn in Estonia. While this was developing, a pro-Kremlin group called Nashi—it means “ours”—set out to engage in an intimidation campaign against the then Estonian ambassador in Moscow, Marina Kaljurand. She's now the foreign minister of Estonia. They followed her everywhere. They threw stuff at her. They threw stuff at her car. They hounded her. They shouted at her press conferences and all the rest of it.

The Estonian government ruled this to be in violation of the Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations. They put Vasily Yakemenko, who was at that time a minister in Mr. Putin's government and the coordinator of Nashi, on a visa ban list. Of course, Estonia being a member state of the Schengen zone of European countries, their blacklist meant a Schengen-wide blacklist.

For the nine years now that have followed, Mr. Yakemenko has been desperately trying to get off that blacklist. He still hasn't succeeded. But in all those nine years, there hasn't been a single case of an attack against foreign diplomats serving in Moscow, including even Ukrainian diplomats, even with all the stuff going on in the last two years, not a single case.

So if ever you need an example that these sanctions work, if applied effectively and at the appropriate level, I would use that example.

[The Chair, Liberal, Bob Nault]

Okay.

Mr. Browder, I was curious about one last point. As I understand it, Mr. Cotler did present a private member's bill on a couple of occasions to the House of Commons under the previous government. Those attempts failed, obviously, or you wouldn't be here. Was there any reason that the previous government felt strongly not to move on Mr. Cotler's legislative structure of this process? Of course, it would be interesting to know if there were some technical concerns or issues that they thought needed to be resolved before they could move on a piece of legislation like that.

I'd be interested to hear your comments on that.

[William Browder]

I can't speak for the previous government, since I was an outsider just trying to make the previous government act, but as I understand it, the reason for the delay was parliamentary mechanics. His private member's bill didn't have the proper lottery number or some term that you use here. In other words, he didn't have the moment in which he could actually present it to be considered for a vote, so he chose a secondary route.

I feel a little embarrassed speaking for Irwin, who's sitting right here. He could probably explain this better than I could.

[The Chair, Liberal, Bob Nault]

Don't worry; we will invite him. I can guarantee that.

[William Browder]

Since he didn't have the lottery number to make his presentation formally, he chose to use the immense credibility he'd accumulated among his parliamentary colleagues on a cross-party basis to say that since he didn't have an opportunity to present his private member's bill, he would ask for their support of a specific call for the government to do this. On that basis, everybody in Parliament supported him. It was unanimous. Then the government got to work.

I don't believe there was any intention for the government not to do this. I think it was purely a matter of running out of time that this whole thing didn't become a piece of legislation. I'm sure that many technical issues had to be addressed, as there were in America. It took us a long time from start to finish to iron out all the technical issues to address the concerns. A lot of that stuff, as I understand it, was already ironed out in the previous government.

I actually met with members of the staff at Global Affairs, and they've already had a year to work on this. We're not starting from scratch here. This is not something that's unknown. I think the principle has been more or less agreed to, and the details. This is not a big stretch to go from the campaign promise to the implementation. It just requires the political will to do it.

[The Chair, Liberal, Bob Nault]

Thank you.

Mr. Saini.

[Raj Saini, Liberal, Kitchener Centre, ON]

First of all, on behalf of all of us, I want to thank you very much for your compelling testimony. Each one of you, I think we can all collectively agree, is a profile in courage.

When a crime is committed, you have, I think, different layers of participation. At the initial layer are the people who are directly implicated, who have the maximum advantage from that crime. Then you have a second layer. They may not have that direct implication but they know of the crime. From my understanding of your testimony about the situation in Russia, a lot of these people, whether you call them whistle-blowers or just people who want to come forward, may not have the comfort, the security or safety, to come forward with the knowledge they have.

Obviously this is a very well-known case, but I'm sure crimes are being committed there every day where people have knowledge of the crime but have not been able to come forward because of fear, fear of retribution, fear of punishment. Is there some mechanism you envision, with your experience, where we can create an environment, maybe not so much domestically but maybe internationally, that would highlight these crimes? I think if they're highlighted, and if there are a lot of crimes happening that come more to the attention of the world, they might have a different response.

[William Browder]

Let me take a crack at that. Maybe Vladimir will back me up.

There are so many human rights abuses in Russia and they are done with such brazenness that it's not hard to prove many of these cases. I guess it's a question of picking the low-hanging fruit first. In many cases, you don't need whistle-blowers. There are people with dossiers of evidence who are showing up now in the United States, all on different cases, and trying to get people added to the sanctions list. As Vladimir said, the big frustration is that there are only 39 people on the list.

It's an evergreen concept. The law exists and will continue to exist so that more people can be added, but we're having trouble getting the political will to add significant numbers of people. There probably should be 10,000 people on this list.

The real issue, which I think Vladimir and Zhanna can speak to, is that nobody in Russia has any confidence that anybody in the west wants to add anybody to any list. I think plenty of people do show up and would like to show up with more information if they had any confidence that something would happen and that there would be consequences for these people who have committed these grave crimes.

There's nothing worse than being a victim of a crime, going to the authorities, whether they be authorities in your country or the authorities in a different country, and having the authorities ignore that crime. That's a feeling most people have with regard to the west—and when I say “the west”, it includes Canada, the United States, and Europe in general—which is that terrible and horrific things happen and everybody says, “It's not our problem.”

Effectively, with a Magnitsky act, whether it be a Russian act specifically or a global act, it would give people some hope that in Canada, the United States, and other places, people do care. My hope is that this would become eventually a sort of pedestrian thing where it doesn't even impact any kind of diplomatic relations, and you can be sanctioning human rights violators almost as a sort of process of criminal justice and can continue to carry on diplomatic relations as you choose, which is almost a separate area.

[Zhanna Nemtsova]

I would like to add that I fully agree with the statement of Mr. Browder, but I would like to give an example, which is that in Russia people do not consider themselves criminals. They are proud of it. They know that they enjoy impunity, and they openly.... For example, for Mr. Kadyrov, the ruler of Chechnya, there is both indirect evidence and direct evidence of his probable involvement with my father's assassination, because he has recently issued death threats towards other opposition leaders saying that he would punish them according to the law or without any law, and everywhere....

You don't need any whistle-blowers, because people are proud of being criminals. This behaviour is encouraged. For example, Kadyrov, that ruler of Chechnya in the Russian state, was given another chance to be re-elected as the ruler of Chechnya, and Putin said that he was a very effective ruler of Chechnya, actually after he had issued those death threats.

You have all this evidence. You just have to find a way to stop impunity for these people. On many occasions, I filed an application to question or to interrogate Kadyrov and his closest allies, but there were refusals on the part of the investigative committee. Then I challenged it in Russian court and got another refusal, so I think it's too difficult in Russia. In Russia it's very, very criminal on a very low level.

[Vladimir Kara-Murza]

I'll add a couple of words.

I think you make a very important point about the safety of whistle-blowers. This certainly has been an issue. Again, as we know from the Perepilichny case, even abroad the whistle-blowers are apparently not safe.

I think the point made by Zhanna is the main one here, which is that we're not even at a point where we have to look for whistle-blowers to find more obscure cases, because there are blatant, blazing, in-your-face cases of gross human rights abuses committed by the highest-placed officials in the Putin regime, who openly boast about them. As I mentioned, Mr. Bastrykin openly admitted to threatening a journalist with murder. He then said to him that he was sorry, but he openly admitted doing it.

In the case of Mr. Churov, the head of the electoral commission, we actually have official documents from the Council of Europe, from the OSCE, in the reports of the monitoring missions documenting the fraud. We don't need whistle-blowers for that. It's out there. It's all public.

In this initiative that Bill mentioned a few minutes ago, we met with members of the U.S. Congress back in the spring of last year after Boris Nemtsov was murdered. We proposed introducing sanctions against state propaganda officials in Russia who were personally involved, in the months leading up to his assassination, in incitement against him by calling him a traitor, a foreign agent, and a fifth columnist, and by saying that he would have welcomed Nazi troops in Moscow if he were alive in 1941.

I'm not making this up. These are all on the record. They are public statements made by state propaganda officials month after month and day after day, which created the atmosphere that made it possible to assassinate the leader of the Russian opposition just outside the Kremlin wall. It wasn't created on its own. It was created by specific people with specific names. We know these people, without any whistle-blowers. We know them, but nobody is acting against them.

Before we get to the important point you've raised, I think we have to see some initiative on the blazingly public cases that we know of, that are well documented, and that really should be acted upon.

[Zhanna Nemtsova]

I can add something. We haven't mentioned the high-profile name of the prosecutor general of Russia, Yury Chaika. Alexei Navalny, an anti-corruption activist, recently made a documentary on the facts of the corruption of Chaika and his family and their probable involvement in murders.

What was the result of this documentary? Four million people watched it, but no actions on the part of the government have yet been taken, so Yury Chaika has secured his position as the prosecutor general. Also, there were no lawsuits against Navalny. That means that all the facts presented in the documentary were true.

[The Chair, Liberal, Bob Nault]

I would like to take this opportunity now, because I think we've run out of runway, if we can put it in those terms, and I want to thank the witnesses very much. I don't think there is anybody here at this table who feels any less strongly than you do about the importance of dealing with these kinds of issues.

I want to thank you very much for getting us started in what we know is going to be a very major review of the legislation that now exists in Canada. I think it's well known by everyone around the table that we will be getting some sort of order from the House for this committee to review the Special Economic Measures Act. How your presentation and others will fit into that is extremely important for all of us, so I want to thank you very much.

I want to say to the committee that, as I understand it, we will send the Conservative Party motion that was put forward to our subcommittee for review. I think we are all of the same opinion that we have to find the best way forward to make sure, and we want to look at this motion and the other motions that have been presented to this committee. We'll come back to this committee and make a decision on how we will move forward.

I want to thank all of you very much.

Dean, did you want to say a few words?

[Dean Allison, Conservative, Niagara West, ON]

Yes, just that we task this motion as quickly as possible, and that if we need to have a meeting sooner rather than later, I recommend that we do it the week we get back, on the Monday or the Tuesday.

[The Chair, Liberal, Bob Nault]

Yes, and that will be the first part of our agenda for sure.

Colleagues, I thank all of you for your time. We'll see you on Tuesday in a few weeks.

The meeting is adjourned.