Ivison: Bill Browder’s never-ending quest for justice

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Bill Browder said he was the least likely MBA student at Stanford Business School in the late 1980s to become a human rights activist. In the early 2000s, he was the largest foreign investor in Russia through his Hermitage Fund investment vehicle and made a lot of money.

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But that came to a crashing end in 2009, with the murder in custody of his employee, Sergei Magnitsky, after he uncovered a corruption scandal that reached to the very top of Russian society.

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Magnitsky was held in arrested, tortured and killed after 358 days at the age of 37.

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“That changed my life completely and I gave up my life as a businessman. I’ve spent the last 17 years on a mission to get justice for Sergei, and a mission to get justice for other victims of authoritarian regimes,” he told the Post’s John Ivison.

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He detailed that crusade in his best-selling true-life thrillers, Red Notice, and Freezing Order.

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With the help of political allies like former presidential candidate, John McCain, in the U.S. and ex-justice minister, Irwin Cotler, in Canada, Browder campaigned for the introduction of Magnitsky legislation, which freezes the assets and bans the travel of human rights violators and kleptocrats around the world. Canada was the second country to adopt Magnitsky-style legislation, which is now on the books in 35 countries.

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“It’s effectively the new norm in the world of human rights for righting wrongs and correcting injustices,” Browder said.

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The Canadian Magnitsky legislation was adopted in 2017 but Browder appeared before the House of Commons foreign affairs committee this week, speaking in favour a private members’ bill put forward by Conservative MP James Bezan which would amend and update the act.

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“We got the Magnitsky Act passed in in November of 2017. It was a big deal. I remember the night that the Parliament voted on it, and, at the time, Chrystia Freeland was the foreign minister. She was a strong supporter of it and a person who knew and understood Russia very well, because she had been the Financial Times bureau chief when I was there.

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Shortly after the law was passed, she as the foreign minister imposed the first sanctions list, which included several dozen people who were involved in Sergei Magnitsky’s murder and involved in (Saudi dissident) Jamal Khashoggi’s murder.

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“It was truly remarkable but then something very strange happened – (Freeland) became deputy prime minister and finance minister, and from that moment on, there was not a single person ever sanctioned under the Magnitsky Act. People might be scratching their heads when they hear that but what happened was that when the Magnitsky Act passed, Canada also updated a piece of legislation called the Special Economic Measures Act – SEMA. All future sanctions were done under SEMA, which kind of made no sense. I’ve never gotten a straight answer for why they didn’t want to use Magnitsky but I think back there were some people in your foreign ministry, who didn’t want to inflame Russia by using the name Magnitsky. James Bazan and I were both very frustrated by this,” he said. “Canada wouldn’t have human rights sanctions if it wasn’t for Magnitsky, if it wasn’t for his story.”

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Bezan’s proposal is to change the name of SEMA to the Magnitsky Act. But Browder said the amendments go beyond a change in nomenclature.

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“We’ve now had nine years of experience with this law and there’s a lot of things we need to adjust and fix. Bad actors are trying to get around the legislation. One of the things which I’m most familiar with is that after the Magnitsky Act was passed, the Russian government went on a vendetta. Putin had a personal vendetta against me, chasing me around the world with Interpol red notices, with death threats, with kidnapping threats, with extradition requests. And there’s a name for this type of stuff. It’s called transnational repression. And of course, I’m not the only victim. Many other people who have stood up to dictators, even when they leave their own countries,  find themselves being targeted by the regime. And so one of the provisions that I think is most important in this Magnitsky Act that’s being debated in Parliament is a new category that says if a country or officials in a certain country are exercising transnational repression, victimizing people like me, they should be sanctioned.

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“Furthermore, one of the things that really got under my skin was seeing that people who were sanctioned – they couldn’t travel, they couldn’t use the Canadian banking system, they couldn’t buy Canadian real estate, but their wives could, and their children can. Some of them are living very large and great lives in Canada, even if the main principal in the family was sanctioned for doing horrific things. And so, the idea with this new legislation is to sanction the family members.

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“And then and then the last thing I would say is that the Magnitsky Act, or SEMA using the Magnitsky provisions, is a very powerful tool. But a lot of parliamentarians will propose people to be sanctioned, and then the government just does nothing. This piece of legislation requires the government to respond to parliamentary requests. There needs to be reporting on the whole thing, and it holds the government’s feet to the fire in a more formal way than had previously been done.”

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Ivison asked if Browder if he is pessimistic that the pragmatic power politics around the world has relegated human rights concerns.

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“I tend not to look too pessimistically at anything,” he said. “I think the world has gotten to be a very complicated place but at the same time, there there’s good things happening as well as bad things happening. Viktor Orban in Hungary was basically hijacking the entire European support for Ukraine. And I never understood how it was possible, after Hungary was occupied by the Soviets in 1956, that the Hungarian people would allow something like that to happen. And you know what? They didn’t allow it. They kicked him out in a very definitive way and brought in somebody who’s bringing Hungary back into the European Union, and all the blocking mechanisms that Hungary had used to hijack support for Ukraine have disappeared. And so that’s just one of many examples of good things happening in a world where everyone thinks everything is bad.”

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