Sergei Magnitsky was a lawyer who exposed a massive tax-scam by senior Russian policemen and government officials. Arrested in 2008, he died in prison after prolonged abuse and the denial of medical care for gallstones and pancreatitis. During a hellish 358-day confinement, he wrote 450 complaints about his mistreatment which included being kept in a cell so crowded that he could stand only on one leg. “Justice,” he ruefully observed, “turns into a process of grinding human flesh to mincemeat for prisons and camps, a process in which people can neither effectively defend themselves nor even realise what’s happening. One can only think about when it will end, when one can get rid of this physical and emotional torture.”
Posthumously, Magnitsky’s name would come to haunt his tormentors. Bill Browder, one of his former employers, successfully led an initiative to ensure that states which allowed such abuses could be held accountable. Four years later, in December 2012, the US Congress passed the bipartisan Russia and Moldova Jackson-Vanik Repeal and Sergei Magnitsky Rule of Law Accountability Act – better known as the Magnitsky Act – and similar laws were adopted in Canada, Britain and the European Union. These enable punitive measures, such as asset freezes and visa denial, against individuals who are deemed complicit in human rights violations and other egregious illegality. Importantly, the measures can be used even when the states which employ the targeted individuals do not face international sanctions.
In 2018 the lawyer and scholar Geoffrey Robertson described the rationale behind Magnitsky-style sanctions in this way: ‘[i]f all advanced democracies, with desired banks, schools and hospitals, adopted [Magnitsky] laws and pooled information and target lists, the pleasures available to the cruel and the corrupt would be considerably diminished. They will not be put in prison, but they will not be able to spend their profits as and where they wish, nor travel the world with impunity. They may then come to recognise that violating human rights is a game not worth the candle’.”
Six weeks ago a High-Level Panel of Legal Experts On Media Freedom issued a report on the use of targeted sanctions to protect journalists. In the report the panel’s Deputy Chair, Amal Clooney, notes that during the last two years more than 130 journalists and media workers have been killed for their work and that in a quarter of these cases the prime suspects have been either government or military officials. Predictably, in the overwhelming majority of cases the perpetrators have not been brought to justice. The murder of Jamal Khashoggi is just one striking example of how hard it can be to hold powerful political actors accountable for their actions.
Nevertheless, the report points out that targeted sanctions have already been invoked against many Russian, Iranian and Venezuelan officials – and it recommends that similar measures be used against “‘secondary’ participants (“collaborators, facilitators or ‘middle-men’”); or to counter “serious systemic restrictions on media freedom, including shutdowns of the internet”; that they be applicable to “non-state actors, including companies” and that “States should ensure that sanctions can be applied to their nationals.” It emphasizes that targeted sanctions are one of the few effective mechanisms for pushing back against systemic censorship and attacks on journalists and it concludes that “International sanctions targeting individuals responsible for the abuses can highlight their misconduct, limit their impact and act as a deterrent to future misdeeds. Such sanctions are indeed, in the current global political climate, often the only way to hold those responsible to account.”
