Committee Secretary Joint Standing Committee on Foreign Affairs, Defence and Trade PO Box 6021 Parliament House Canberra ACT 2600, Australia
30 January 2020
Dear Members of the Committee,
It is my privilege to write to you as part of your ongoing Parliamentary inquiry in strong support of the passage of legislation comparable to the United States Magnitsky Act of 2012.
By way of brief background, I am a Russian journalist, historian, and political activist, and was a candidate for the Russian Parliament representing the pro-democracy opposition. For more than fifteen years, I had the honour of working with the late Russian opposition leader Boris Nemtsov, and I currently chair the Boris Nemtsov Foundation for Freedom. Below this letter you will find an addendum with a more detailed biography for your reference.
On 31 December 2019, Russia marked two decades under Vladimir Putin’s rule. An entire generation has grown up not knowing any other ruler or political reality. These years have been marked, above all, by the dismantling of political freedoms and of our country’s nascent democratic institutions. Freedom of the media has been the first target of Mr. Putin’s regime, with all independent nationwide television channels shut down or taken over within the first three years. Today, Russian television – still the primary source of information for the majority of citizens – provides a continuous propaganda drumbeat, with laudatory coverage of the authorities and with attacks on the Kremlin’s opponents who are denounced as “traitors” and “foreign agents”. Indeed, “foreign agent” is now an official designation, introduced by a recent law designed to target non-governmental organisations. Some of Russia’s most respected NGOs, including the Memorial Human Rights Centre, the Golos vote-monitoring association, and the Levada Centre polling agency, have been labeled as “foreign agents”, hindering their work in Russia; while groups with an international reach have been designated as “undesirable organisations” and prohibited from operating in the country altogether.1
Parliament has been reduced to a rubberstamp; “not a place for discussion”, in the unforgettable words of its own speaker.2 Elections have become meaningless rituals, with genuine opponents of the regime routinely barred from the ballot, and with voting marred by intimidation and fraud. The latest national “election” that formally prolonged Vladimir Putin’s rule was held on 18 March 2018. It was conducted in the usual manner, with rigid government control of the media; coercion of voters; numerous instances of ballot-stuffing; and Soviet-style 90-percent “results” for Mr. Putin in several
1 Ministry of Justice of the Russian Federation, Register of NGOs Performing the Functions of a Foreign Agent (in Russian) http://unro.minjust.ru/NKOForeignAgent.aspx Ministry of Justice of the Russian Federation, Register of Foreign and International Undesirable Organisations (in Russian) http://minjust.ru/ru/activity/nko/unwanted 2 Kommersant, 14 December 2011 (in Russian) http://kommersant.ru/doc/1838005 1 regions.3 But the fact is that these violations were largely irrelevant: in the most important sense, the election was rigged long before the first polling station has even opened.
Two prominent opposition leaders were planning to challenge Mr. Putin in 2018: Boris Nemtsov, former Deputy Prime Minister; and Alexei Navalny, founder of the Anti-Corruption Foundation. Neither was on the ballot: Mr. Nemtsov, because three years earlier he had been murdered on a bridge steps away from the Kremlin; Mr. Navalny, because he was deliberately barred from standing by a Russian court sentence that the European Court of Human Rights had found “arbitrary”.4
It is not difficult to win an election when your opponents are not on the ballot. As the head of the OSCE observer mission has stated, “choice without real competition, as we have seen here, is not real choice… Where the legal framework restricts many fundamental freedoms and the outcome is not in doubt, elections almost lose their purpose”.5
The same model of an “election without choice” has been duplicated across the country. Last summer, faced with the prospect of an opposition victory in the election for the Moscow city legislature, the authorities made sure to bar the strongest opposition candidates from the ballot – and jailed many of them for the duration of the campaign. Mass peaceful protests followed, as tens of thousands of Muscovites went to the streets to stand up for their right to vote. The authorities responded with a brutal crackdown, with more than 1,000 arrests made in a single day.6 Several of the protesters were given prison sentences. Among them was Kirill Zhukov, an opposition activist who received three years in prison for the “crime” of touching a riot policeman’s helmet.
Mr. Zhukov is only one on Russia’s growing list of political prisoners. According to the Memorial Human Rights Centre, one of the country’s most respected non-governmental organisations, there are currently 312 political prisoners in Russia.7 The number is conservative, as it only includes those people whose cases Memorial has closely studied and who correspond to the demanding criteria of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe Resolution 1900 (2012) that defined a “political prisoner”.8 This list includes journalists, civil society activists, human rights advocates, participants of peaceful demonstrations, adherents of prohibited religious groups, and members of “undesirable” organisations. It includes Alexey Pichugin, Russia’s longest-serving political prisoner who has been incarcerated since 2003 in violation of two rulings by the European Court of Human
3 Golos, Preliminary Statement on the Results of the Observation of the 18 March 2018 Election for President of Russia (in Russian), 19 March 2018 https://www.golosinfo.org/ru/articles/142563 Central Electoral Commission of the Russian Federation, Official Results of the 18 March 2018 Election for President of Russia (in Russian) http://www.vybory.izbirkom.ru/region/region/izbirkom?action=show&root=1&tvd=100100084849066&vrn=10010008484 9062®ion=0&global=1&sub_region=0&prver=0&pronetvd=null&vibid=100100084849066&type=227 4 The Guardian, 23 February 2016 https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/feb/24/russias-conviction-of-opposition-leader-alexei-navalny-arbitrary- european-court-says 5 OSCE Office for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights, Statement, 19 March 2018 https://www.osce.org/odihr/elections/375661 6 The Guardian, 27 July 2019 https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/jul/27/moscow-police-arrest-up-to-200-ahead-of-election-protest 7 Memorial Human Rights Centre, Current List of Political Prisoners (in Russian) https://memohrc.org/ru/pzk-list 8 Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe Resolution 1900 (2012), 3 October 2012 https://assembly.coe.int/nw/xml/XRef/Xref-XML2HTML-en.asp?fileid=19150&lang=en 2 Rights and a decision by the United Nations Working Group on Arbitrary Detention.9 It includes Yuri Dmitriev, a historian who has worked to document mass burial sites from Stalin-era executions.10 It includes Dennis Christensen, a Danish citizen and a leader of the Jehovah’s Witnesses, a religious organisation prohibited by the Russian government.11 It includes Anastasia Shevchenko, an opposition activist and a single mother who became the first person to be indicted under the law on “undesirable organisations”.12
Russia’s political prisoners are a diverse group. What unites them is that their continued incarceration violates our country’s international commitments under the Council of Europe and the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe, as well as under the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights. According to Memorial, since 2015 the number of political prisoners in the Russian Federation has increased six-fold.
But arbitrary detention, slanderous propaganda, electoral disenfranchisement, and even long- term imprisonment are not the worst consequences for those who oppose Vladimir Putin’s regime. Increasingly, murder or attempted murder is becoming a tool of political reprisals. I am very fortunate to be writing this letter after being twice – in 2015 and in 2017 – subjected to near-fatal poisoning attempts in Moscow.13 Others have been less fortunate. Several high-profile critics of the Russian government have met with untimely death, both inside and outside of the country. As I already mentioned, in what was the most brazen and high-profile political assassination in modern Russia, on 27 February 2015 opposition leader Boris Nemtsov was gunned down in central Moscow. Nearly five years on, the organisers and masterminds of his murder remain unidentified and unindicted – and fully protected by the Russian authorities.14
Yet there is a fundamental double standard engrained in Vladimir Putin’s system of power. For years, the same people who undermine and violate the basic norms of democracy and the rule of law in Russia have been enjoying the protections and privileges provided by democracy and the rule of law in the West. Because it is in Western countries where many senior officials and oligarchs of the Putin regime choose to keep their money, spend their holidays, park their families, and buy their homes. They want to steal in Russia but spend in the West.
9 European Court of Human Rights, 18 March 2013 https://hudoc.echr.coe.int/eng#{%22tabview%22:[%22document%22],%22itemid%22:[%22001-114074%22]} European Court of Human Rights, 6 June 2017 https://hudoc.echr.coe.int/eng#{%22itemid%22:[%22001-174061%22]} United Nations Working Group on Arbitrary Detention, 19–23 November 2018 https://www.perseus-strategies.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/05/UNWGAD-Opinion-892018-Alexey-Pichugin.pdf 10 Human Rights Watch, 1 November 2019 https://www.hrw.org/news/2019/11/01/russias-crackdown-human-rights-defenders-escalates-0 11 United States Commission on International Religious Freedom, 7 February 2019 https://www.uscirf.gov/news-room/press-releases-statements/uscirf-condemns-russian-conviction-danish-prisoner- conscience 12 Amnesty International, 25 January 2019 https://www.amnesty.org/en/documents/eur46/9737/2019/en/ 13 The Washington Post, 2 February 2017 https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/global-opinions/a-mysterious-and-terrible-turn-of-events-in- russia/2017/02/02/b43fb9ca-e965-11e6-bf6f-301b6b443624_story.html 14 U.S. House Resolution 156, 12 March 2019 https://www.congress.gov/bill/116th-congress/house-resolution/156/text 3 It is time to end this corrosive practice. Those who engage in abusive behavior at home should not be welcome in countries that pride themselves on their adherence to human rights and the rule of law. That is the principle behind the groundbreaking legislation that has now been enacted in six countries and that is named in honor of Sergei Magnitsky, a Russian tax lawyer who discovered a large-scale tax fraud scheme involving government officials – and was imprisoned and killed in for it.
The principle behind the law is very simple: individuals complicit in gross violations of human rights and corruption will no longer be able to receive visas, own assets, or use the financial and banking systems of the democratic West. Boris Nemtsov called the Magnitsky legislation “the most pro-Russian law in the history of any foreign Parliament” because it holds to account the people who violate the rights of Russian citizens and plunder the money of Russian taxpayers.15 He wrote that “all the infamies of this regime – the lies, the cruelty, the wrongful convictions, the stealing, the bigotry – come from impunity… These scoundrels should know that they will have to answer”.16
To be sure, the Magnitsky legislation is a pale substitute for justice. The penalty for torture, murder, wrongful imprisonment, or grand corruption should not be a cancelled holiday or a frozen bank account – but a real trial in a real court of law. One day, this will be possible in Russia. For now, it is not, and targeted sanctions from Western democracies serve as the only mechanism of accountability for corrupt Kremlin officials and human rights abusers. I am grateful to the Australian Parliament for considering similar legislation, and I look forward to the day Australia joins the growing chorus of democratic nations in challenging impunity for human rights violations – and in sending a clear message that crooks and abusers are no longer welcome.
If called to testify in support of this legislation at a Parliamentary hearing, I would be honoured to do so.
Yours faithfully,
Vladimir V. Kara-Murza
15 A Dangerous Slide Backwards: Russia’s Deteriorating Human Rights, U.S. Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, 13 June 2013 https://www.foreign.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/061313_Transcript_A%20Dangerous%20Slide%20Backwards%20Russia's %20Deteriorating%20Human%20Rights.pdf 16 The Washington Post, 2 May 2018 https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/democracy-post/wp/2018/05/02/the-uk-makes-history-on-human-rights/ 4 Addendum: Brief Biography
Vladimir Kara-Murza is a Russian democracy activist, politician, author, and filmmaker. He was a longtime colleague of Russian opposition leader Boris Nemtsov and chairs the Boris Nemtsov Foundation for Freedom. Kara-Murza is a former deputy leader of the People’s Freedom Party and was a candidate for the Russian State Duma. He has testified before Parliaments in Europe and North America and played a key role in the passage of the Magnitsky legislation that imposed targeted sanctions on Russian human rights violators in the U.S., Canada, Great Britain, and several EU countries. U.S. Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) called Kara-Murza “one of the most passionate and effective advocates for passage of the Magnitsky Act”; U.S. Sen. Ben Cardin (D-Md.) described him as “a courageous advocate for the democratic process and fundamental universal human rights”. Twice, in 2015 and 2017, Kara-Murza was poisoned with an unknown substance and left in a coma; the attempts on his life were widely viewed as politically motivated. He is a contributing writer at the Washington Post and hosts a weekly show on Echo of Moscow radio, and has previously worked for the BBC, RTVi, Kommersant, and other media outlets. He has directed three documentary films, They Chose Freedom, Nemtsov, and My Duty Not to Stay Silent; and is the author of Reform or Revolution: The Quest for Responsible Government in the First Russian State Duma and a contributor to several volumes, including Russian Liberalism: Ideas and People, Europe Whole and Free: Vision and Reality, and Boris Nemtsov and Russian Politics: Power and Resistance. Kara-Murza has led international efforts to commemorate Nemtsov, including with street designations in Washington D.C. and Vilnius. He is a vice president of the Free Russia Foundation and a senior fellow at the Raoul Wallenberg Centre for Human Rights; and has been a visiting fellow at the University of Chicago, leading a seminar course on contemporary Russia. Kara-Murza has been profiled on CBS 60 Minutes and NBC Nightly News, and has appeared on CNN, Fox News, MSNBC, and BBC Newsnight. He is a recipient of several awards, including the Sakharov Prize for Journalism as an Act of Conscience, the Magnitsky Human Rights Award, and the Geneva Summit Courage Award. He holds an M.A. (Cantab.) in History from Cambridge. He is married, with three children.
5