Thank you very much for inviting me to talk about INTERPOL today. It's quite a topical and important issue, which has risen to the top of the global agenda in the last couple of days; however, it's been on my agenda for a lot longer than a couple of days. I thought it would be useful for the committee to hear my experience with Russia's abuse of INTERPOL to understand where the flaws in the system are.
Many of you will know me from the work that I've been doing over the last nine years in the Magnitsky justice campaign. For those of you who don't know me, I am Bill Browder. At one time I was the employer of my lawyer, Sergei Magnitsky, in Russia. Sergei Magnitsky uncovered a massive $230-million corruption scheme. He exposed it and in retaliation he was arrested, tortured for 358 days and killed in November 2009.
For the last nine years, I've been on a mission to get justice for him and that mission for justice ended up focusing on legislation named after Sergei Magnitsky, called the Magnitsky Act. In 2012, I was able to advocate in the United States to get the U.S. Congress to pass the Magnitsky Act in December 2012. I should say that this piece of legislation very much upset Vladimir Putin. It upset Vladimir Putin because the Magnitsky Act freezes assets and bans visas of human rights violators from Russia. Vladimir Putin is a human rights violator and he's a person with a lot of assets. Therefore, he felt personally at risk from this legislation.
He embarked after that on a vendetta against me, which has lasted up until today. One of the first and most obvious signs of that vendetta was that in May 2013, about five months after the Magnitsky Act was passed in the United States, Russia issued an INTERPOL red notice for me. An INTERPOL red notice is effectively as close as you get to an international arrest warrant, in which Russia asked to have me arrested through INTERPOL any place that I travelled to.
When we became aware of this, my lawyers provided detailed evidence that this request from Russia was illegitimate and politically motivated. I'm a quite high-profile campaigner. My issue was quite high profile and it did rise to the level of being evaluated in INTERPOL through an organization inside INTERPOL called the Commission for the Control of Files. That's the organization that is supposed to look at the legitimacy of red notices if there's a meaningful challenge.
This Commission for the Control of Files, shortly after we filed our documents, about two weeks later, came to the conclusion that Russia's request to have me arrested violated INTERPOL's constitution. INTERPOLS's constitution says that INTERPOL should not be used for political, religious or military purposes. In this particular case, they said it violated the constitution because it was politically motivated and, therefore, they rejected it. Then they informed all 194 member states not to honour this red notice and to delete it from their system.
I thought that was the end of the story. I thought that I would no longer have any trouble with Russia and INTERPOL.
Shortly after that, as part of Putin's vendetta, I was put on trial in absentia in Russia. Not only was I put on trial, but they put Sergei Magnitsky, my lawyer who had been murdered three years earlier, on trial as well, in the first-ever trial against a dead man in the history of Russia. At the conclusion of the trial in July 2013, I was found guilty and so was Sergei Magnitsky, and Russia then applied again, on the same charges that had been rejected before, for another red notice. Again—and it didn't require any intervention from my side at this point—Russia's request was rejected.
At that point, I thought for sure that I was finished with trouble from Russia abusing INTERPOL, but I was not. In 2014 the Russian government applied again through INTERPOL to have me arrested. It was again rejected in 2015. There were two more attempts after that, which were rejected.
Then, in October of last year, the Canadian Parliament—you—passed the Canadian Magnitsky act. Literally a day after the Canadian Magnitsky act was passed, Russia issued another INTERPOL notice. That time, it was a diffusion notice, not a red notice. A diffusion notice is a slightly less vetted type of arrest warrant. It's effectively like a preliminary arrest warrant while they process a red notice. Russia issued a diffusion notice for me. Again, after my applying to INTERPOL and pointing out that this was politically motivated, INTERPOL rejected it about a week later. That was number six. That was the sixth time they went to INTERPOL.
As of Tuesday of this week, the European Union has begun serious discussions on an EU Magnitsky act. On the same day, the Russian government announced a whole number of new charges against me, including the unbelievable and ludicrous charge that I somehow murdered Sergei Magnitsky. They then announced that they were going to INTERPOL for a seventh time. On a serial basis, we have Russia abusing INTERPOL. They just did not get the point after one, two, three, four, five or six times.
What is the moral of this story? The moral of the story is that if a country wants to abuse INTERPOL they can just keep on abusing INTERPOL, and it doesn't really matter how many times they do it.
INTERPOL has in its rule book a set of rules that say that if a country consistently abuses INTERPOL, then that country can be suspended from using its systems. I would say that my case by itself—I'll talk just briefly about other cases in a moment—is a perfect example of serial abuse by a country of INTERPOL. This provision in the INTERPOL constitution has never been activated, but as I would argue, part of my project for the next few months is to put formally in place a request for INTERPOL to suspend Russia from their systems.
Let me finish off by saying one thing, which is that my story tells you about serial abuse. In theory, some people from INTERPOL could argue, “Look, our systems do work, because every time Russia has gone after Bill Browder, we have rejected it.” That's all fine and nice, except that I'm probably the most high-profile person in the world with this problem. I've even written a book called Red Notice, which is an international bestseller. Everybody knows about me, with all my notoriety and my resources, but there are literally hundreds if not thousands of human rights lawyers, activists and opposition politicians in Russia who don't have my notoriety, my resources and my lawyers, and who are being chased down.
Thank you.