Mr. William Browder:

I thank the Chair. It is great to see him again. I thank members of the committee for this opportunity to discuss this hugely important legislation. I am the head of the Global Magnitsky Justice Campaign. My work for the last 12 and a half years has stemmed from the murder of my lawyer, Sergei Magnitsky, after he uncovered a massive Russian Government corruption scheme. He exposed it and in retaliation he was arrested, tortured for 358 days and killed on 16 November 2009. I have made it my mission since then to get justice for him and one of the main tools for justice is the legislation called the Magnitsky Act. The Magnitsky Act was designed to freeze the assets and ban the visas of the people who killed Sergei Magnitsky, the people who profited from his crime and the people who commit similar types of crime in Russia and around the world.

The United States passed the Magnitsky Act in December 2012. At that time, it was specifically for Russia. The Magnitsky Act was then broadened in 2016 - it is called the Global Magnitsky Act - to apply to human rights abusers all over the world.

After that, the Canadian Parliament unanimously passed its own Magnitsky Act, as did the UK, European Union and Australia. Norway has a Magnitsky Act, as do Kosovo and Montenegro. I am hoping that this legislation being considered today will become the Irish Magnitsky Act to be passed in due course.

I wish to say a couple of things regarding what is happening in Ireland. Some may ask why Ireland needs a Magnitsky Act or some version of it when the European Union has one. I have seen the dysfunction of the European Union when it comes to sanctions. Every country has a veto right over the sanctions list. In the Magnitsky case the Hungarian Government vetoed any Magnitsky killers being sanctioned in the EU, so only the United States, Canada, the UK and Australia, along with Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia, have sanctioned Magnitsky's killers. Those same individuals could travel to Ireland right now and open bank accounts in Ireland. They could transact business and buy property in Ireland. Ireland has an opportunity to have a Magnitsky Act whereby it can operate its own sovereignty, so Ireland is not a soft touch for people such as Magnitsky's killers and they cannot come to this country.

I also wish to respond quickly, if I have the time, to the statement by previous speakers. The way the Magnitsky Act is structured in other countries is that a person is identified and any assets that belong to that person are subject to freezing. It is next to impossible to prove that assets coming from a human rights abuse are in a jurisdiction. It relies on the offending jurisdiction to provide evidence, which is often impossible. However, it is not so impossible to provide evidence of human rights abuse, so it is very much in Ireland's interest to have a legislative measure similar to that of all the other countries which states that if a person is guilty of human rights abuse based on whatever legal standard Ireland decides to apply, that person's assets in Ireland's jurisdiction will be frozen. Anything more complicated than that will make it an inoperable legislative measure. I will leave it at that.