Mr. Chairman and ladies and gentlemen of the Standing Committee on Foreign Affairs, I thank you for giving me the opportunity to come before you today and for your continued focus on the murder of Sergei Magnitsky and the efforts that I and my colleagues have embarked on to get justice for Sergei Magnitsky and for the other victims of human rights abuses in Russia.
As many of you know, Sergei Magnitsky was murdered on November 16, 2009, about six and a half years ago, after being tortured for 358 days after being unjustly arrested for accusing Russian officials of being involved in the largest tax refund fraud in Russian history. The evidence of his murder and his torture is well documented and overwhelming.
In spite of that, the Russian government exonerated every single person involved. It gave special state honours to some of the most complicit and, in the most absurd legal nihilism probably in the history of Russia, they then put Sergei Magnitsky on trial three years after they killed him, in the first-ever trial against a dead man in the history of Russia.
It became obvious that the only chance of justice was justice outside of Russia.
The people who killed Sergei Magnitsky killed him for money. They killed him to cover up the theft of $230 million.
Those people don't like to keep their money in Russia; they like to keep it in the west. They like to keep it in real estate in Toronto, in bank accounts in Zurich, and in villas on the French Riviera. They like to travel, to send their kids to boarding schools in the west, and to send their girlfriends on shopping trips, and they like to be on vacation themselves. So we came up with this idea of naming the names, freezing the assets, and banning the visas of the people who killed Sergei Magnitsky and the people who commit other gross human rights abuses. It became known as the Magnitsky Act.
I launched this initiative in Washington on a bipartisan basis with Senator Benjamin Cardin of Maryland and Senator John McCain of Arizona. I launched this effort in conjunction with Irwin Cotler, who's sitting right here today and who is a colleague of yours, and I launched it in the European Parliament and in various other places.
One of the principal arguments that the Russian government made to try to stop this from happening was that this law was anti-Russian. I could scream until I was blue in the face that it wasn't anti-Russian, but the person who showed up and helped quash that argument was Boris Nemtsov. Boris Nemtsov, the leader of the Russian opposition, showed up in Canada, in the United States, and in Europe, and said that this was not anti-Russian but pro-Russian. He said that it was anti-Russian for Russian officials to steal from us and then kill us, and that it was pro-Russian to go after those people on a targeted basis and sanction them for doing that.
Boris Nemtsov went around to all these different law-making bodies. So did Vladimir Kara-Murza. As we know, a year and two weeks ago, Boris Nemtsov was murdered in front of the Kremlin.
Vladimir and I were in the House of Representatives about two months after Boris was murdered. At that point, the Magnitsky law had passed in America and had become a law. We were asking the Congress to put on the Magnitsky list the people who were involved in calling for Boris Nemtsov's assassination. Vladimir, shortly after that, was poisoned in Moscow. He went into a coma and multiple organ failure, and his doctors suggested that he had a 95% chance of dying and a 5% chance of living. It's only through an act of God that Vladimir is sitting here next to me today, having survived this unbelievably terrible ordeal.
The situation in Russia since we started this campaign for justice for Sergei Magnitsky and justice for other victims of human rights abuses has become dramatically worse. Whatever restraint Russia had in previous times has all but disappeared. We're now in a situation where there's total and absolute repression.
In March of last year, I came to Canada. With Irwin, and with a number of people who are sitting here today, a resolution was put in front of the House calling on the Canadian government to impose a Canadian version of the Magnitsky Act. There was a unanimous vote in favour by the House. There was also a unanimous vote in favour by the Senate. I was promised by the foreign affairs minister and the immigration minister at the time that the government would impose a Magnitsky act for Canada.
I had meetings with the lawyers working in the foreign affairs ministry to discuss the mechanics of it, and then, sadly, the mandate of the government ended and we were not able to get the Magnitsky act fully implemented.
During the election campaign, my colleagues and I went to every party—the Liberals, the NDP, and the Conservatives—and asked them whether they would support a Magnitsky act. Every party put it in writing that they would support a Magnitsky act if they formed a government. The Liberal Party won the election and formed a government. Moments after the government was formed, I said to Irwin, “Let's go back to Ottawa and get the government to fulfill their campaign promise.” Irwin said, “Let's wait until everybody has found their seats.”