Our adoption of the Magnitsky law was a rare and hard-won victory for human rights activists. So far, however, the legislation seems only to be gathering dust

When Canada joined the United Kingdom and the United States last October in adopting a new and innovative international mechanism to isolate and quarantine globetrotting police-state thugs and their dirty money, hopes were high. But so far, the Justice for Victims of Corrupt Foreign Officials Act, more commonly known as the Magnitsky law, appears to be gathering dust.

Canada’s adoption of the law, which allows Ottawa to freeze the assets of human rights abusers, was a rare and hard-won victory for human rights activists.

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During the 2015 election campaign, Justin Trudeau’s Liberals had promised to bring in the law, but after Stephane Dion was appointed Foreign Affairs Minister in Trudeau’s first cabinet the momentum stalled, sputtered, and then came to a dead stop. Dion was determined to reopen a “dialogue” with Vladimir Putin, whose kleptocratic regime in Moscow was facing stiff international sanctions after Russian troops invaded Ukraine and the Kremlin annexed Crimea in 2014.

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The Magnitsky law was inspired by Sergei Magnitsky, a Russian anti-corruption whistleblower who was killed in a Moscow prison in 2009. Along with his American client, Bill Browder, a fund manager, Magnitsky had been determined to expose a US$230 million tax embezzlement by a group of Kremlin cronies who were spiriting the cash out of the country and re-investing the loot in foreign real estate and business ventures.

Dion’s successor, Chrystia Freeland, had been a fervent champion of the Magnitsky law, and in her early innings, things were looking up

Quite a few Canadian companies backed Dion in opposing the adoption of a Magnitsky law. So did a circle of senior Global Affairs officials who were intent on throwing off the hard anti-Kremlin line Canada had staked out during Stephen Harper’s years in the prime minister’s office. But after the law won an enthusiastic cross-party consensus in the House and the Senate, Dion was shuffled out of cabinet in January, 2017, later taking up an appointment as Canada’s envoy to the European Union and ambassador to Germany. Dion’s successor, Chrystia Freeland, had been a fervent champion of the Magnitsky law, and in her early innings, things were looking up.

Photo by THE CANADIAN PRESS/Paul Chiasson

Passed in October, last year, the reach of the law was expanded to bar any corrupt foreign official from entering Canada, to freeze their assets and outlaw any dealings with them. Only three weeks after the Justice for Victims of Corrupt Foreign Officials Act was passed, 52 Russian, South Sudanese and Venezuelans were targeted.

It’s a rogues’ gallery of torture-state gangsters. Top of the list: Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro, whose regime has jailed opposition leaders, driven the oil-rich South American country into destitution, and forced 1.5 million Venezuelans to flee, mostly to neighbouring Colombia, where they subsist on World Food Program handouts. Last week, the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights accused Venezuelan authorities of killing at least 500 people with impunity.

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Also on last November’s blacklist: Dmitry Klyuev, the ringleader of the Russian criminals who carried out the embezzlement Magnitsky exposed, and Fikret Tagiyev, warden of the decrepit Matrosskaya Tishina prison where Magnitsky died.

It’s getting ridiculous, at this point. What has her department been doing all this time?

And then, months passed. It wasn’t until Feb. 16 that another name was added to the list: Burma’s Maj.-Gen. Maung Maung Soe, who had already been sanctioned by the United States two months before.. The general headed up the Western Command of the Myanmar army in Rakhine state, where more than 720,000 Rohingya Muslims have been “ethnically cleansed” and driven into neighbouring Bangladesh.

And that’s it.

Marcus Kolga, a senior fellow with the Macdonald-Laurier Institute and a specialist in sanctions and Russian foreign policy, said it’s not unreasonable to go easy on Freeland, who has been juggling several complex foreign policy files, not least the negotiations with Donald Trump’s White House over the North American Free Trade Agreement. “But it’s getting ridiculous, at this point. What has her department been doing all this time?”

Maung Maung Soe was named separately on Monday in a group of seven Myanmar military figures added to another Canadian sanctions list, this one under the Special Economic Measures Act — a cumbersome, difficult-to-monitor aggregation of more than 1,000 government entities, private corporations and individuals. The listing follows the European Union’s decision, also announced Monday, imposing sanctions on the same seven senior officials.

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Photo by Alexander Zemlianichenko/AP Photo

“Canada and the international community cannot be silent,” Freeland said Monday. “This is ethnic cleansing. These are crimes against humanity.”

And those are fighting words. But Ottawa’s approach to the containment of international criminals and their dirty money isn’t exactly impressive.

Two months ago, a Transparency International survey of the G20 countries put Canada at the bottom of the list, with South Korea, in a ranking of G20 countries’ diligence to expose and root out money being moved around by corrupt officials. The opacity of Canada’s corporate registration laws has given rise to the term “snow washing” to describe how internationally sanctioned entities can easily engage in money-laundering in Canada. Another problem with the Special Economic Measures Act: any entity sanctioned for doing business with, say, Syria, can evade Canada’s sanctions laws by simply registering a Canadian subsidiary anonymously and carrying on as if the laws didn’t exist.

The government set aside $22 million over five years to get the Magnitsky law up and running. “I don’t know,” Kolga said, “but what are they doing with those funds?”

The Magnitsky law was intended to apply sanctions more directly, and be readily enforceable. But so far, it looks like the consensus of the House of Commons and the Senate doesn’t count for much, and Stephane Dion and his circle of supporters in the Global Affairs bureaucracy ended up having things their way, after all.