Stop the Untouchables. Justice for Sergei Magnitsky.

Sergei Magnitsky: Quest for justice in Russian lawyer’s death begins to yield results

Toronto Star

On the night of Nov. 16, 2009, a battered body was carried from an isolation cell in Moscow’s Matrosskaya Tishina prison. It was that of 37-year-old Sergei Magnitsky.

The young, upcoming tax lawyer had been held in some of Russia’s roughest prisons for a year, and according to records, tortured, locked up in inhuman conditions and denied medical aid when he suffered an agonizing pancreatic ailment.

“He was an idealist,” says his former employer William Browder. “He could have left the country, but he believed that Russian law would protect him. But there is no rule of law in Russia.”

Magnitsky’s “crime” was to blow the whistle on the largest tax fraud ever perpetrated in Russia, and he paid with his life.

Now Browder, once Russia’s biggest foreign investor, devotes his time and resources to seeking justice for Magnitsky. The quest has led to an international confrontation, landmark legislation on human rights, and an awareness that officials at the highest levels can be held accountable.

The U.S. Congress has just passed a Magnitsky Act that freezes the assets of 60 Russians linked with his death and bars them from entering the country: it spreads the net wider, to all those responsible for gross violations of human rights in Russia.

In Canada, Liberal MP Irwin Cotler is introducing a similar private member’s bill. Browder met this week with Public Safety Minister Vic Toews and Immigration Minister Jason Kenney. Other Western countries are watching closely.

Russia has retaliated furiously, passing a tit-for-tat bill to sanction Americans who commit human rights violations against Russians. It’s shaping up as the biggest chill in relations since the Cold War.