Thank you for the question, Mr. Garon. That is an important point.
The data that our centre has submitted to the committee is the result of the amendments made to the Special Economic Measures Act in the context of human rights and the fight against corruption.
The Magnitsky Act has been used a little over 60 times. However, the amendments to the Special Economic Measures Act that the Magnitsky Act led to have made our sanctions regime much clearer and more definitive in the fight against human rights violations and corruption.
The numbers that we submitted, the 482, are those that would have been possible only post 2017. Before then, the threshold for sanctions was a grave breach of international peace and security that has resulted in or is likely to result in an international crisis. That threshold change has allowed for a much more expansive use of sanctions that we think are rather timely given the global resurgence of authoritarianism, of neo-liberal populism and of acts of aggression. The fact that those laws were changed accordingly is incredibly important.
The disuse of the Magnitsky law as it is, as opposed to the lower thresholds under the Special Economic Measures Act, is an interesting question that we explore in greater depth in our written submissions to the committee. It's our assertion that this is an issue of rhetoric rather than substance. The laws are largely parallel. There are some minor distinctions between them—you know, the allowance for a sanctioning of entities under SEMA, but only of individuals under the Magnitsky act—but by and large, we actually call for, because of this, a shift in the use of language in order to allow for better coordination among our allies and to make use of the important resonance that the word “Magnitsky” has, such that we call both SEMA and Magnitsky law implementation for human rights and anti-corruption “Magnitsky laws”.