Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman and members of the subcommittee on human rights, for inviting me here today.
For those of you who don't know the story, I'd like to briefly repeat the story of Sergei Magnitsky. Then I'll tell you what has happened since the last time I testified here in front of the subcommittee.
The story starts out more than 15 years ago, when I moved to Russia to set up Hermitage Capital Management, which became the largest foreign investment firm in Russia. When I was there, I discovered that the companies in which I was investing in the Russian stock market were essentially being robbed. Billions of dollars were being stolen from these companies.
I decided to try to fight the corruption by researching how it was done and then exposing it through the mass media. As you can imagine, doing such a thing didn't create that many friends. In November 2005 I was expelled from the country and declared a threat to national security.
In 2007 police officers raided my Moscow office, seized all of our corporate documents, and then used those documents, through a complicated scheme, to steal $230 million of taxes that we had paid to the Russian government the previous year. It wasn't our money that was stolen. It was Russian government money that was stolen.
It was a very complicated and legally unpleasant experience, so we went out and hired a number of lawyers, including a lawyer named Sergei Magnitsky, who was 36 years old and worked for an American law firm at the time. He was, in my opinion, one of the smartest and most diligent lawyers in Moscow. He went out to investigate the situation and the crime. He came back with evidence and clear proof that government officials were involved in this enormous $230 million tax theft.
Instead of turning a blind eye, as many others would have done at the time, Sergei Magnitsky decided to testify against the officials who were involved. He testified in July of 2008, and again in October of 2008. One month later, on November 24, 2008, two subordinates of one of the police officers he testified against came to his home at 8 in the morning, in front of his wife and two children, arrested him, and put him in pretrial detention.
While he was in pretrial detention, he was tortured to get him to withdraw his testimony. His jailers put him in a cell with fourteen inmates and eight beds, and left the lights on 24 hours a day to impose sleep deprivation. They put him in a cell with no heat and no windowpanes in December in Moscow, and he nearly froze to death. They put him in a cell with no toilet, just a hole in the floor where the sewage would bubble up.
After six months of this treatment, his health started to break down. He lost 40 pounds, developed severe stomach pains, and was diagnosed as having pancreatitis and gallstones. He needed an operation, which was prescribed on the first of August in 2009.
One week before the scheduled operation, he was abruptly moved away from the prison that had medical facilities to a prison called Butyrka, which is a maximum-security prison and widely considered to be one of the toughest prisons in Russia. Most significantly for Sergei, at Butyrka they had no proper medical facilities to treat his ailment.
At Butyrka his health completely broke down. He went into constant, agonizing, unbearable pain. He and his lawyers made 20 desperate official requests for medical attention. In spite of his pleas, every single one of his requests was either ignored or denied.
Finally his body succumbed. On the night of November 16, he went into critical condition. On that night, the prison officials decided to move him back to a prison with medical facilities. He was transferred to Matrosskaya Tishina prison that night, but when he arrived there, instead of being treated in the emergency room, he was put into an isolation cell and eight riot guards with rubber batons beat him for one hour and 18 minutes. He was subsequently found dead on the floor of that cell on the night of November 16, 2009, more than three years ago.
How do we know all this? We know it because in Sergei’s 358 days in detention, he wrote 450 complaints detailing every aspect of how he was tortured: what they did to him, who did it, where they did it, and how they did it.
Because of these documents, he created an unbelievably detailed record of what happened to him. In conjunction with that, after his death, we've confronted on a legal basis the Russian law enforcement system, and from that we've been able to glean lots of other documents supporting and proving all the things that he said had happened to him.
As a result of the documents he created and the documents that have come out of the Russian justice system, we have what I would consider to be the most well-documented human rights abuse case that has come out of Russia in the last 25 years. Because of all this information, there have now been, since he died, 39,000 articles in the Russian press mentioning the name Sergei Magnitsky.
Now, everything that I've told you is appalling—you can't not be appalled by it—but what makes this story truly significant on an international political level is not the actual crime they committed, but what happened afterwards. And what happened afterwards is a high-level government cover-up that goes right up to the President of Russia.
It's kind of like Watergate. It wasn't the break-in that made that crime so significant. It was the cover-up that led to the resignation of the President of America at the time.
Just to give you some idea of the cover-up, one day after Sergei died, the Russian interior ministry announced that Sergei had never complained about his health and that he died of natural causes, with no signs of violence, even though in looking at any pictures from the autopsy report you can see that his arms, wrists, and knees are black and blue.
Every single one of the police officers, judges, jailers, and members of the security service involved in this case have been formally exonerated. Some have even been promoted and granted state honours. As if that wasn't enough, to add insult to injury, they're now taking Sergei to court more than two years after his death and prosecuting him in the very first posthumous prosecution in Russian history. They're putting a dead man on trial. And if that wasn't enough, the same officials who killed Sergei are now summoning his grieving mother and wife as witnesses in the case against their dead son and husband.
Given these circumstances, it is clear that no justice is possible inside Russia, so his family and I have sought justice outside of Russia. In 2010 I was invited to testify in front of the U.S. Congress to tell the story of Sergei Magnitsky. Following my testimony, Senator Benjamin Cardin, the co-chair of the U.S. Helsinki Commission, and representative Jim McGovern, co-chair of the Lantos House Human Rights Commission, proposed an initiative to withdraw the U.S. visas of the 60 officials identified as playing a role in the Sergei Magnitsky case. We couldn't necessarily force the Russian government to prosecute his killers, but they certainly didn't have the right to enter the U.S.
On November 15, 2012, with an unprecedented bipartisanship, the U.S. House of Representatives voted in favour of passing the Magnitsky Act by 365 to 43. The U.S. Senate voted last Thursday, passing the Magnitsky Act by 92 to 4. The Magnitsky Act freezes assets, bans visas, and names names of the people who killed Sergei Magnitsky. Broader than that, it bans visas, freezes assets, and names names of people who perpetrate other human rights abuses in Russia.
Since the Magnitsky Act was proposed, 11 parliaments around the world, including this Parliament, have introduced motions, resolutions, petitions, and legislation that have called for visa sanctions and asset freezes on the people who killed Sergei Magnitsky, as well as others who perpetrate gross human rights abuses in Russia. Resolutions calling for visa bans and asset freezes have also been passed in the European Parliament, the Council of Europe, and the OSCE Parliamentary Assembly.
There is only one group of people in the world that is against this legislation, and that is the Russian regime itself. They're absolutely terrified that this would possibly come into force. Until now, they've lived in a world where they can commit human rights abuses with no consequence, since they control their own justice system, and they know that they can torture and kill with full knowledge that nothing will happen to them. In many ways, they cannot control their own system if they cannot guarantee impunity for the foot soldiers who commit these crimes.
The Russian hierarchy, after initially dismissing such threats of sanctions, is now so terrified of the repercussions of this legislation that three days after President Putin was re-inaugurated he announced that his third most important foreign policy priority was to fight Magnitsky sanctions. He assigned his foreign minister to publicly threaten any country that considered passing Magnitsky sanctions.
In an unprecedented move, members of the Russian parliament were actually sent to Washington to slander Sergei Magnitsky and to try to talk Congress out of passing the Magnitsky Act, which they failed at.
I am here today to urge you, the members of the Canadian House of Commons, to follow the lead of the U.S. Congress and join parliamentarians across Europe and deny visas to and place asset freezes on the people who played a part in the false arrest, torture, denial of medical care, and death of Sergei Magnitsky, and on those who took part in the cover-up of this thing. They should not be able to come to Canada freely, and they should not be able to buy properties here or take holidays here and enjoy the fruits of their blood money here.
Thank you very much.
