Bill Browder, the founder and CEO of Hermitage Capital Management, and Congressman Jim McGovern (D-MA) discussed the future of U.S. foreign relations through the lens of the 2009 trial of Sergei Magnitsky in an event sponsored by the Institute for Business in the Global Context (IBGC). The event was attended by about 60 people and took place at 5:30 p.m. on Monday in the ASEAN Auditorium in Cabot Intercultural Center.
McGovern said in his introductory remarks that Browder, the most prominent foreign capitalist in Russia until 2005, worked tirelessly to promote human rights and defend justice during and after Magnitsky’s trial.
Browder said he began to investigate corruption in the Russian national economy when he realized that the companies he was investing in were being “robbed blind” by the government. He noticed that oligarchs hired government officials and manipulated those officials’ votes. Browder explained that he worked to expose “oligarchs who were challenging the presidency,” so, remarkably, President Vladimir Putin was on his side for a time. Then, Putin arrested Mikhail Khodorkovsky, who was once Russia’s richest man, and convinced other oligarchs to pay him to avoid similar fates.
“From that moment on, Putin became the richest man in Russia … and all of my activities became extremely unpopular with him because I was no longer exposing his enemies,” Browder said. “I was exposing his own personal economic interests.”
In response to Browder’s expository activities, the Russian government detained him at the airport and deemed him a threat to Russian security the following day. He was then expelled from the country. Police officers raided his law firm and seized his assets. Browder said he hired Magnitsky as a lawyer and Magnitsky testified against the police officers who conducted the raid.
As a result, Magnitsky was arrested, detained and tortured. He was kept in cells with no heating, which nearly froze him to death, and with the lights on at all hours to promote sleep deprivation. Over the course of his imprisonment, he was pronounced to be in critical condition. Officials promised to transfer him to a hospital; instead, they placed him in an isolation cell, chained him to a bed and beat him to death.
In December 2012, the Magnitsky Act, also known as the Sergei Magnitsky Rule of Law Accountability Act, was passed with a vote of 92-4 in the Senate and a plurality vote of at least 85 percent in the House of Representatives. The act was initially introduced in 2010 by McGovern, and drew unprecedented degrees of support across partisan lines according to Bhaskar Chakravorti, the executive director of IBGC.
“The act directs the president to identify individuals responsible for the detention, abuse or death of Sergei Magnitsky, or of other Russians seeking to expose illegal activity by Russian officials,” McGovern said.
The 39 people on the “Magnitsky List” have been made ineligible for U.S. visas, or their visas have been redacted, McGovern said. Their assets have been frozen, and they have been effectively prohibited from doing business in the U.S., he explained.
The Magnitsky Act was initially specific to Russia, but McGovern was involved in its global expansion. Still, he emphasized that the act cannot be a substitute for reinforcing the rule of law in the face of human rights violations.
“We should all work for the day when judicial systems at the national level are strong enough and independent enough to investigate and punish the people who use their positions of power to repress their citizens’ most basic rights,” he said.
McGovern also stressed that the broader aim of the act is to defend human rights. As the co-chair of the Tom Lantos Human Rights Commission in Congress, McGovern said he is committed to prioritizing human rights, even as military and trade issues tend to garner more attention from the House Foreign Affairs Committee.
McGovern said that the future of U.S.-Russia relations with regard to Trump’s impending presidency “remains to be seen,” but he expressed a general sense of doubt that Trump would be successful in repealing the Magnitsky Act, primarily because it passed overwhelmingly in both the House and the Senate.
In an interview with the Daily, Chakravorti described the impetus for hosting the talk. He said that the IBGC deals chiefly with the “intersection of business and the other aspects of the world,” and he emphasized the importance of the Magnitsky trial as an example of how international business intersects with issues of human rights.
Lis Tarlow, an alumnus of the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy and the former executive director of the Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies at Harvard University, said she attended the talk because she was “absolutely interested in this case.”
“I have enormous respect for Bill Browder in his crusade for human rights,” she said.
Jim McGovern, Bill Browder discuss U.S.-Russia relations, defending human rights
