Putin’s reaction proof Canada’s law has effect
In late October, Parliament passed an innovative and historic piece of human rights legislation known as the Sergei Magnitsky Law. Once implemented, it will allow the government to place targeted sanctions against global human rights abusers by freezing their Canadian assets and banning their entry into this country.
Vladimir Putin’s regime has predictably expressed its disproportionate outrage, which should not discourage the prime minister or his government from fully implementing the sanctions this law enables. The legislation only targets individuals who engage and profit from the abuse of human rights. Those who observe and respect them have no reason to fear Canada’s Magnitsky Law.
The legislation is named in honour of a Russian lawyer who in 2008 discovered a massive $230 million tax fraud committed by Kremlin officials. When Magnitsky reported the fraud, he was imprisoned in Moscow’s notorious Butyrka prison. A year later, Magnitsky was handcuffed to a bed and beaten by prison officials. He died shortly afterward, on Nov. 16, 2009.
The new legislation was unanimously supported by all parties and brings Canada to the international vanguard of human rights defence.
Canada’s allies have applauded the passage of the Magnitsky Law, and some are looking to follow Canada’s example. It is safe to assume Russia, under Putin, will not be among them. His furious reaction at the annual meeting of the Valdai Club in Sochi made international headlines last week.
The Russian president dismissed the human rights law as “unconstructive political games” and “anti-Russian hysteria.” Putin then launched into a rant about Bill Browder, the leader of the global campaign for Magnitsky legislation,
and issued an international arrest warrant for him in efforts to bar him from travelling to Canada with the Magnitsky family this week.
The Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs also has promised swift retribution.
When the United States adopted Magnitsky legislation in 2012, Putin retaliated by banning U.S. families from adopting Russian orphans. However, according to Russia’s draconian anti-LGBT laws, Canada’s same-sex-marriage laws already prohibit Canadians from adopting Russian children. With minimal trade between Canada and Russia, it remains to be seen how else Russia could possibly retaliate against Canada.
Washington Post columnist Anne Applebaum noted last week that if the Kremlin’s furor about the Canadian Magnitsky Law is taken as a measurement, then it “has its place, and it’s having an effect.”
As other nations adopt Magnitsky legislation and calibrate their own sanctions with Canada’s and the U.S., the world’s human rights abusers will have fewer stable western nations to which to travel and in which to hide their assets.
As western nations slam their doors to these abusive regimes, pressure for reform may lead to greater accountability and a rise to freedom in those nations.
Canada must now be bold in its implementation of the Sergei Magnitsky Law and should never allow any repressive autocrats or regimes to influence decisions about who we sanction and where.
Just as Canada took a global lead in 1948, in helping develop the Universal Declaration on Human Rights, so have we done by adopting this new human rights legislation.
Now, let’s use it.