Canada must stand up to Putin
Magnitsky law takes power away from Kremlin
Russia’s preferred style of government down the centuries has blithely been called despotism, tempered by assassination.
But Canadian MPs hope that Vladimir Putin’s absolutism can be moderated by less dramatic means — international human rights pressure.
The move by Canada to introduce new anti-corruption legislation has provoked a visceral reaction from the Russian government.
The bill that will go to a final vote in the House of Commons Wednesday runs “against common sense and Canadian national interests,” said the Russian embassy in Ottawa late Monday.
The so-called Magnitsky Act, named after tax accountant Sergei Magnitsky, who was found dead in his Moscow prison cell after uncovering a $230-million corruption ring in 2008, will likely become law Wednesday.
But its proponents say it isn’t targeted specifically at Russia.
Irwin Cotler, the former justice minister who pioneered the private member’s bill on which the current legislation is based, says the Russians are implicating themselves.
“It’s directed at human rights violators from whatever country and is intended to combat cultures of criminality and impunity. Countries that are not engaged in those acts need not concern themselves,” he said.
If the legislation had been in place last week, it may have been used to impose sanctions on 40 Venezuelan officials, including President Nicolas Maduro, he said.
But Vladimir Putin has made it clear that he sees the global move to adopt Magnitsky legislation as a personal slight.
In a last-ditch attempt at intimidation, the Russians called the bill a “deplorably confrontational act blatantly interfering in Russia’s domestic affairs,” and promised to meet the move “with resolve and reciprocal countermeasures.”
Similar legislation passed in the U.S. in 2012 was met with a ban on adoption of Russian kids by Americans — immediately stranding 300 orphans who never did get to meet their American families.
Putin won’t be able to pull that stunt again — Canada is already banned from adopting Russian children because of its support for same-sex marriage.
But the Russian leader never backs down from a fight, so we can expect a manoeuvre as unabashed as the use of orphans as human shields.
Canada should remain equally resolute in the face of a regime that in the words of Bill Browder, the hedge fund manager who employed Magnitsky, sees the world like a prison yard, where backing down implies weakness. “Before you know it, you will have lost respect and become someone’s bitch. This is the calculus that every oligarch and every Russian politician goes through every day,” he wrote in Red Notice, the bestseller that chronicles the Magnitsky affair.
A brief recap of the lawyer’s story should be enough to put steel in the spines of anyone tempted to turn a blind eye to Putin’s excesses.
As Browder put it: “Russia had no rule of law, it had rule of men. And those men were crooks.”
Browder’s firm, Hermitage Capital Management, was the largest investor in Russia. In 2008, his tax lawyer, Sergei Magnitsky, uncovered a corruption scheme that allowed state officials to steal $230 million in taxes paid by Hermitage.
Rather than being commended, he was arrested for tax evasion, put in a freezing cell and denied contact with his family. The authorities tried to compel him to retract his testimony but he refused. He lost 40 pounds because of untreated gallstones, which he endured for months without the benefit of painkillers.
Instead of surgery, he was sent to a maximum detention centre, where medical attention was withheld.
After refusing to co-operate with a court hearing that he said refused to uphold his rights, he was visited by eight guards in riot gear and beaten to death with rubber batons. Many of the details of the case and his subsequent treatment were documented in diaries and in the 450 criminal complaints he filed.
“Keeping me in detention has nothing to do with the lawful purpose of detention. It is punishment imposed merely for the fact that I defended the interests of my client and the interests of the Russian state,” he wrote.
Yet Russian authorities found no wrongdoing by officials, no violation of the law and determined he died of acute heart failure.
But unlike other Russian human rights violations, Magnitsky’s ideals were not buried with him.
Browder carried on his fight and succeeded in persuading lawmakers in the U.S., U.K. and European Union to target Russian officials thought to be responsible, by prohibiting entry and use of their banking systems.
“Canada is playing a bit of catch-up,” said John Boscariol, head of international trade and investment at McCarthy Tétrault.
He said the new legislation will send important signals to individuals that they will not be able to shelter assets in Canada, and it will give the government another tool, in addition to the Special Economic Measures Act, which allows for actions to be taken against another state.
The embassy press release suggests by passing Magnitsky, Canada will isolate itself “from one of the key world powers at a time when building alliances, diplomacy and engagement are in high demand.”
That suggestion might be less risible were Russian troops not camped in Crimea and eastern Ukraine.
The truth is the various Magnitsky acts are cracking Putin’s social contract with the elites he needs — the corrupt bargain where he curtails freedoms in return for providing wealth to loyal officials and a decent standard of living to the middle class.
The response to Canada passing Magnitsky may well be dramatic — three-quarters of Russians see their country as a great power and Putin will not accept humiliation without an asymmetric reaction.
But this country has already made clear that it finds the actions of the Putin government repugnant by imposing sanctions on Russian oil, financial and defence companies in the wake of the Crimean invasion.
Chrystia Freeland, the Global Affairs Minister, finds herself in the strange position of being banned from travel to Russia.
She has her own insights into the Magnitsky affair from her time as a journalist in Moscow with the Financial Times. Browder recalls her as being “zealous with a fire in her belly” and hungry for a story about corrupt oligarchs, if she could find someone brave enough to speak on the record.
Putin’s visceral reaction to the Magnitsky legislation stems from an understanding that his power comes from the connivance of ordinary Russians. They are prepared to discount his excesses, if he makes them prosperous or “great.”
But Magnitsky remains dangerous for Putin — he was a middle-class tax lawyer who stumbled on a corruption scheme and paid the ultimate price for it. “Any Russian could have been Sergei Magnitsky,” said Browder.
Winston Churchill said it best when he talked about dictators.
“They are afraid of words and thoughts; words spoken abroad; thoughts stirring at home — all the more powerful because they are forbidden, terrifying them. A little mouse of thought appears in the room and even the mightiest potentates are thrown into panic,” he said.
Canada’s Magnitsky bill is that “little mouse of thought” and parliamentarians should pass it into law expeditiously.