Madam Speaker, I was close enough. I should have written that down.
The hon. member brought forward a bill in the last Parliament, as I did. In this Parliament, we have stuck them together and expanded on them to deal with corrupt foreign officials and kleptocrats from the many different theocracies and dictatorships. In these regimes, especially Communist regimes, people continue to use their powers and positions of influence to be kleptocrats, be corrupt and commit atrocities against their own people.
This bill would make amendments to the Department of Foreign Affairs, Trade and Development Act and the Justice for Victims of Corrupt Foreign Officials Act, also known as the Sergei Magnitsky Law, which Senator Raynell Andreychuk and I brought in back in 2017 and became law. The bill would also update the Special Economic Measures Act to rename it to the Sergei Magnitsky global sanctions act. It would also amend the Broadcasting Act.
Just so everybody knows who Sergei Magnitsky is, in case they have not been exposed to his story, a gentleman a lot of members might know, Bill Browder, wrote a book called Red Notice. He was American and was the largest foreign investor in Russia until 2005. In 2008, it became evident that kleptocrats in the Kremlin were using his former company to commit tax evasion and tax fraud, so he hired a lawyer and accountant by the name of Sergei Magnitsky, who uncovered the largest tax fraud in Russian history. He was then arrested, detained, tortured and killed. It was a horrific thing that happened. He died in detention in a Russian prison on November 16, 2009.
None of the individuals who were responsible for the fraud, the false accusations and the criminal charges that were brought against him, and none of the individuals who enriched themselves from government coffers through the tax fraud they committed in the name of Bill Browder, were ever sanctioned and brought to justice. We cannot allow Canada or our allies to sit on the sidelines while gross human rights violators and corrupt foreign officials continue to commit atrocities, enrich themselves, abuse their citizens and ultimately walk away. Canada cannot be a safe haven for that.
Parliament started engaging with this back in 2012. Bill Browder, former Russian opposition leader Boris Nemtsov and Vladimir Kara-Murza of the People's Freedom Party were here in Parliament to call on the government of the day to adopt Magnitsky sanctions to protect human rights activists in Russia and make sure that pro-democracy activists around the world were better protected, because we were going to name, shame, sanction and ban those individuals from allied nations.
In 2012, the United States adopted the first Magnitsky legislation. It was followed by the European Parliament in 2013. As we all know, on February 27, 2015, Nemtsov was assassinated just outside the Kremlin, on the bridge right beside it.
In March 2015, here in Canada, both the House and the Senate brought forward resolutions, which were passed unanimously, calling on the government to install Magnitsky sanctions. In 2017, the Sergei Magnitsky Law was adopted unanimously after it was brought forward by Senator Andreychuk in the Senate and me in the House.
Using the name of Sergei Magnitsky in our sanctions regime delivers a strong political message against Putin's brutal dictatorship and his equally corrupt allies. In the bill's preamble, it asks the government to continue to engage with our friends around the world to establish the international anti-corruption court at The Hague. This is something that has been advocated for by Integrity Initiatives International. Canada, the Netherlands and Ecuador issued a statement back in November 2022 to work towards getting it established. I was on a call just last week, and that process continues.
We need to have the international anti-corruption court with the purpose that, if we can arrest and prosecute those corrupt foreign officials, we would be not only reducing the crimes against citizens in those countries, but probably also decreasing the number of crimes against humanity. Before anyone ever becomes a genocidal maniac, they always start off as a corrupt foreign official. First, they get stuff and money out of the treasury and into their own pockets, and then they start abusing their citizens. That is when we see genocides happen, war crimes happen, human rights violated, and political prisoners and people of conscience thrown in jail.
I will go through what this bill would do. First, it would require the Minister of Foreign Affairs to publish an annual report on what the Government of Canada is doing to advance human rights internationally, as well as include the names and the status of prisoners of conscience around the world, especially Canadians who are being held in other countries. This is important, and we now have a definition of what a prisoner of conscience is. I will get into it later.
We would also amend the Justice for Victims of Corrupt Foreign Officials Act, the Sergei Magnitsky Law, and the Special Economic Measures Act, also known as SEMA, so they would better align with each other and the legislation would no longer be in conflict with each other, as well as align ourselves with what our allies are doing.
We would define what transnational repression is and sanction foreign nationals who commit it in Canada and elsewhere. We would ban immediate family members of sanctioned foreign nationals so Canada cannot be used as a safe haven, or as a way to hide their children, their spouse, their concubines and their girlfriends, as we often see, and use them as a way to illegally move their illicit funds into Canada, as well as protect their families from the very people they are abusing back in their own countries. The bill would require the government to table in Parliament the names of foreign nationals and entities that are added to the sanctions list to ensure there is better transparency. We would have that tabled back here in the House so we can look at it as parliamentarians.
It would require the RCMP and FINTRAC to report to the Minister of Foreign Affairs on the making, administrating and enforcing of sanctions. I will get into that a little bit later. It would allow parliamentary committees to recommend names and entities to be sanctioned, and require the minister to report back to the House on that decision, or to the Senate if the committee and the Senate should undertake these studies.
This is an opportunity for those in the diaspora communities across Canada to have direct input into the process of why people should be added to lists, or maybe why they should not. It would also amend the Broadcasting Act to immediately revoke licenses for media outlets that are operated by sanctioned entities, individuals or states that the House or the Senate has recognized as having committed a genocide. Immediately, those states would have all their media banned from the Canadian airwaves.
The definition of transnational repression involves the tactics used by a foreign state to intimidate, harass, surveil or threaten individuals or groups located outside the state borders, or to physically harm such individuals or members of such groups, including elected officials, political dissidents, human rights defenders, exiled journalists, diaspora communities, civil society activists and refugees for the purpose of silencing dissent and stifling activism.
We know the corrupt regimes of the People's Republic of China, the Chinese Communist Party, of Iran and of Russia are doing this in Canada right now. We hear these stories all the time. Just on November 13, the Globe and Mail reported, “CSIS director warns that China and Russia continue to target Canada”. When I meet with diaspora communities, they have story after story of somebody who is tied to the government of their nation, or the embassies and consulates they have located across this country, out there intimidating the families.
In the last election, Joe Tay, who was the Conservative candidate for the riding of Don Valley North, was told by the RCMP and by CSIS not to go out and door knock, because his life was in danger. This was based upon the intelligence they received from other individuals who were informing them about foreign agents working against him. Joe, of course, has celebrity status within the Chinese and Hong Kong community, and as an advocate for Hong Kongers, has now been targeted by both the Hong Kong executive council and the regime in Beijing.
We know the story of the Chinese police stations that were set up all across Canada to intimidate Chinese Canadians to ensure that they were not doing things China was not in favour of.
We have a very small Uyghur community in Canada; I had a number of them in my office just last week. One young woman told me that she came to Canada and started to speak out against the genocide and atrocities being committed against the Uyghur people, such as forced labour camps, sterilization and reprogramming, which is the brainwashing of children, taking away their faith and their language. The woman has a very sick mother, who is still in China, and she is being denied treatment because of her daughter's activities here in Canada in fighting for human rights and freedom.
I was in Halifax at the International Security Forum this past weekend, and I was talking to the executive director of the World Uyghur Congress. She said that she started speaking out against the Chinese government and the Communist regime in Beijing, and her sister was arrested in 2018. She has had no contact with her for the entire seven years.
We always have the Falun Gong practitioners and their activism; their families are also being targeted. We have the Hong Kong Watch patrons.
We also know about the Iranian community here and how it is being targeted by agents of the theocracy in Tehran. They are also driving around with police cars that are painted up just like the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps.
The one thing that we are going to require is for the minister to publish this report once a year on what they are doing on prisoners of conscience and on human rights activities. A prisoner of conscience is an individual who, in contravention of international human rights standards, has been detained or otherwise physically restricted solely because of their identity or their conscientiously held beliefs, including religious or political beliefs.
Again, we have heard from many different diaspora communities and families of prisoners of conscience that this is happening. Jimmy Lai is another one we hear about. He is a media mogul; he is 77 years old. He went through a show trial that lasted for months on end, and he has been held in solitary confinement for over 1,700 days without access to his medications. His health is failing, and he is being held there because he is an advocate for democracy within Hong Kong. Of course, they will not have any part of that in Beijing or in Hong Kong through the executive council.
Vladimir Kara-Murza, who is a supporter of this bill and has been here before, has been targeted and poisoned twice by Russian agents. He was left in a coma at one time, and then he was imprisoned recently, in 2022, because he criticized Putin and his war machine for invading Ukraine. He stood on the side of Ukraine, and he was arrested and held. Luckily, through a prisoner swap, he was able to get out and is now free again. He told me that the only thing that works is public attention. If it wasn't for public attention, he says he would be dead in Siberia now.
We kept on talking about Vladimir Kara-Murza. The House passed a unanimous motion, brought forward by my friend from Calgary, the current Deputy Speaker. He brought it forward to give honorary citizenship to Vladimir Kara-Murza. Because of that, he is free today, and it is the same for the two Michaels. When we can shine the spotlight on this type of corruption, these atrocities and human rights abuses, people go free and democracy, human rights and liberty are better served.
