‘Use Magnitsky laws on Chinese’

THE West should use Magnitsky laws to sanction Chinese officials for human rights abuses, Bill Browder has said.

The political activist, whose lawyer Sergei Magnitsky was tortured and killed in a Moscow prison in November 2009, has argued that, despite a decade of Magnitsky Acts, “democratic and free nations are not using these laws enough”.

Writing for The Daily Telegraph with Bob Seely, a senior Conservative MP, he argues that the “law gives us the power to act, not only against Russia”, but against regimes like China”.

Mr Magnitsky was 37 when he was arrested after uncovering a web of corruption allegedly involving senior Russian officials. Three years after his murder, the US passed the Sergei Magnitsky Rule of Law Accountability Act, which in 2016 was widened to become the Global Magnitsky Act, enabling the United States to go after human rights abusers globally.