Bill Browder, an investment firm executive and human rights activist, is trying to persuade Canada to ban Russians who were involved with the torture and death of a Russian lawyer in 2009.
Browder, who was expelled from Russia in 2005 and now runs his firm Hermitage Capital Management from London, is appearing before a parliamentary subcommittee on international human rights Tuesday.
He will tell the story of Sergei Magnitsky, a Russian tax lawyer, who helped Browder expose tax refund fraud carried out by Russian government officials.
Magnitsky testified against the officials involved, and was arrested and put in prison on pretrial detention in 2008. Over a year later, without ever being brought to trial, his health gradually deteriorated, and in 2009 he was found dead in his cell.
Russian tax lawyer Sergei Magnitsky was arrested and died in a Moscow jail after he exposed tax fraud by Russian government officials. His death has become an international human rights issue. (Alexander Zemlianichenko/Associated Press)
Browder told the same committee in a previous appearance in 2012, that Magnitsky had been beaten with rubber batons.
Browder, whose firm he described as the largest foreign investment firm in Russia, has vowed to bring world attention to Magnitsky's death and seek retribution for the officials who persecuted him.
In 2012, he managed to convince the U.S. to pass the Magnitsky Act. The act, Browder told the committee, "freezes assets, bans visas, and names names of the people who killed Sergei Magnitsky. Broader than that, it bans visas, freezes assets, and names names of people who perpetrate other human rights abuses in Russia."
On Tuesday, Browder will also appear at a news conference on Parliament Hill with human rights activist and Liberal MP Irwin Cotler.
The two will make the case that while Canada has imposed sanctions in response to Russian aggression in Ukraine, the government should respond similarly to domestic human rights abuses perpetrated by Russian officials, according to a press release issued by Cotler's office.
Browder has been conducting an international campaign for Magnitsky's cause, and the European parliament just adopted a resolution calling on European governments to impose sanctions on Russian officials.
In 2012, Browder told the committee he didn't believe Russia would ever properly investigate what happened to Magnitsky. But he said if officials were to be confronted with the prospect of their assets being frozen overseas and a travel ban, they might think twice about committing a human rights crime.
"My hope, as a campaigner for justice, but also for Sergei's legacy, is that the law with his name on it will save lives in the future, because people will be afraid to do these types of things," he said.
Browder made the same plea in Canada in 2012 but no action was taken. Now that the government has strongly condemned Vladimir Putin's regime in Russia over its aggression in Ukraine, it may be more amenable to extending its list of banned Russians.
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