Mr. William Browder:

The Magnitsky case is a perfect test for what would work here and what would not. I have seen this because I have worked now with many different governments and parliaments on these sanctions. The Magnitsky case is all about, as was said, the uncovering by Sergei Magnitsky of a $230 million scam. He exposed it and he was then arrested by the people he exposed and tortured to death. A number of people were then involved in the cover-up of his murder and the financial crime he had exposed. When we went to get sanctions imposed, certain countries, such as the UK, originally passed a Magnitsky Act that just went after human rights abuses. They did not go after kleptocracy or corruption, and that meant they could only go after about 25 of the 50 people who had been sanctioned in America. That was obviously not very helpful. The people committing the human rights abuse tended to be some of the low-level officials, whereas the high-level officials were the ones who were involved in ordering the crime and in benefiting financially from it. Eventually, the UK added a series of new provisions so that its legislation could capture corruption. We ended up getting all the perpetrators, including those involved in the cover-up after the murder.

As far as this law goes, it is important that the definitions are not so tight that one cannot capture the people involved in a crime. If one can prove that people are benefiting financially from a human rights abuse, that is great, but that is a very small subset of people. To prove that somebody is involved in kleptocracy is much easier. To prove that somebody has been involved in human rights abuse is not that hard, but to connect kleptocracy to human rights abuse is almost impossible. Therefore, it is extremely important that the definition, however it ends up being defined, captures as many of these participants in the crime as possible. When it comes to proving it, there are probably 500 people or entities now on the global Magnitsky list of the US. I cannot say this with certainty, but I believe all those people were sanctioned not because there was any co-operation from any foreign government, but because of information provided by the victims, NGOs or by the US Government itself, which found ways of acquiring such information, through intelligence sources, etc. If the burden of proof is on the balance of probabilities, that proof can come from wherever it needs to come from and it does not need to rely on the co-operation of a foreign government. It would be naive and unrealistic to expect to expect one would get such co-operation from those people.