Thank you very much for this opportunity to discuss the Magnitsky act in Canada and the ways in which we can amend and improve it.
As many members of the committee know, I was one of the original advocates of the Canadian Magnitsky act. Sergei Magnitsky was my lawyer in Russia. He was murdered for uncovering a massive corruption scheme in 2009. Canada passed the Canadian version of the Magnitsky act in 2017.
We're now in a situation where 35 countries have Magnitsky acts and use them against human rights abusers and kleptocrats around the world. It's been a remarkable, and I would say viral, legislative initiative that has done a huge amount of good and created a counterbalance to dictators and bad actors in the world. It's something that gives the victims some hope for the future. I'm very proud to have been involved in this, but there are things we can do to improve it. That's what I am here to talk about today.
The first thing I want to say is that, as many of you know, Canada rarely uses the Magnitsky act. Canada often uses the Special Economic Measures Act when there are human rights abuses. Of course, it's good that a sanction uses whatever it has to punish human rights abusers, but part of the beauty of the Magnitsky act is that it is multilateral. In other words, other countries have it. Part of the benefit and part of the objective of the Magnitsky act is that we have sanctions imposed on bad actors not just by Canada but by other countries as well.
One of the problems with the Special Economic Measures Act, which is used instead of the Magnitsky act, is that it causes confusion. To the extent that we want to get other countries to act in unison, which is a very important objective, that gets lost by this misnaming of something that is pretty much the same thing. I would argue emphatically that either the Magnitsky act should be used, or, as I understand it, there is some type of proposal for an amendment to the Special Economic Measures Act to call it the Magnitsky act, so that when Canada is sanctioning human rights abusers, everybody knows that you're using the Magnitsky act and other people who have a Magnitsky act are signalled to use it as well.
My first proposal for an amendment is to either rename the Special Economic Measures Act or use the Magnitsky act when it comes to human rights abusers.
This leads me to the second proposal, which is that harmonization between countries is crucial. We now have a situation where Canada might sanction someone and the U.K. wouldn't.
I am very aware of a very specific situation that I am involved in right now. A friend of mine, one of the people who advocated for the Canadian Magnitsky act, is a Russian opposition dissident named Vladimir Kara-Murza. He has been put in Russian prison and is facing 24 years in prison for calling out Putin's war in Ukraine. Canada, very rightly, and as a first country, has sanctioned a number of people involved in his false arrest. Unfortunately, we're still now working on other countries to do the same thing.
To the extent that there can be some type of formal provision in the Canadian Magnitsky act to actively work with other countries to harmonize sanctions, it would have a much greater effect. I can absolutely tell you, since I've been to all the countries, that Canada is not necessarily talking to the U.K. Perhaps they're talking to the U.S., but there should be something formalized in the law to say that there's a responsibility to try to get other countries to do this.
The third thing I would propose is that it's confusing for victims of human rights abuses to approach the government and to know how to share evidence in order to get people sanctioned. There should be a single point of contact. There should be widespread education on how the process works among NGOs and human rights groups and victims groups so that everybody knows how to go about doing this. There's no mystery. You don't need a law firm. You don't need a specialist. Anyone can go online and figure out how to present and propose evidence and know how to do it in the best possible way.
The final thing I would say is that at the moment there is no responsibility for the government to report back to Parliament about what it's done or what it hasn't done with Magnitsky sanctions. It's Parliament's job to oversee the government, and the government often doesn't have any good excuse for why it hasn't gone forward on Magnitsky sanctions. I've been involved in a number of situations where submissions have been made, and it's like going into a black hole. After they make the submissions, nobody knows what's going to happen next.
I believe there should be some type of parliamentary review. There should be some type of responsibility for the government to say, here are all the submissions we have and here are the ones we've acted on, so that there is some type of transparency and some type of accountability of the government to do this.
It's a—