Curbing the Hate Pandemic by Irwin Cotler, Ahmed Shaheed and Brandon Silver

2021/08/12 Leave a comment

Strong arguments in favour of using Magnitsky Laws to combat incitement to violence and discrimination. In addition to the examples cited, would this apply to some of the statements by former president Trump? And will governments have the political will to do so given economic and other interests?

Liberal democracies have not provided an adequate policy response to widespread and systematic state-sanctioned hate directed at many minorities. Rapid implementation of targeted sanctions against individuals inciting hatred and discrimination could possibly prevent further crimes.

The COVID-19 pandemic has intensified the spread of an equally virulent virus: hate. Effective vaccines offer the best hope of defeating the coronavirus. We now need similarly targeted legal measures against those inciting hatred.

Today, a rapid worldwide resurgence of racism and xenophobia is targeting minorities like Jews, East Asians, and LGBT persons – with attendant harassment and physical harm – as being responsible for the spread of the coronavirus. In addition, some states have used the cover of COVID-19 restrictions and distractions to extend long-standing hateful policies.

This pandemic of hate long preceded the public-health pandemic, which exposed and expanded it. But despite this growing threat, far too many instances of hateful incitement go unaddressed, much less redressed, contributing to cultures of criminality and the impunity that underpins them. In particular, liberal democracies have not provided a commensurate and concrete policy response to the widespread and systematic state-sanctioned hate that continues to cause the misery, murder, and migration of many minorities.

Sadly, state-sanctioned anti-Semitism, anti-Muslim hatred, and bigotry against black and indigenous people are global phenomena. Emblematic examples of country-specific hate include the constitutionally enshrined discrimination and government incitement against Ahmadiyya Muslims in Pakistan, and the apartheid-like system of unjust imprisonments and dispossession of the Baha’i religious minority in Iran.

Worse, the perpetrators of these crimes continue to travel largely unimpeded around the world. Maintaining the status quo – decades of brutal persecution that shows no signs of abating – could best be described as complicity.

Combatting such hate is not only an ethical imperative, but also a public-policy one. Hate tears at society’s seams, and catalyzes crisis and conflict. This naturally progresses to mass atrocity. The Holocaust and subsequent genocides resulted not simply from a machinery of death, but also from an ideology of hate. The dehumanization of Tutsis as “cockroaches” by Radio Télévision Libre des Mille Collines planted the seeds of Rwanda’s killing fields in the 1990s in the same way that Joseph Goebbels’ anti-Semitic propaganda paved the path to the gas chambers of Auschwitz.

The world has long had a corpus of international laws intended to combat such crimes. After the horrors of the Holocaust, the international community crystallized a commitment to our common humanity in documents like the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and treaties such as the Genocide Convention, conventions on the elimination of racial discrimination and discrimination against women, and the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights. They recognize – and enshrine in law – the imperative of the struggle against hate and incitement, and the need to prevent and punish its manifestations, lest it metastasize.

But the implementation of human-rights foreign-policy tools based on these norms has been woefully inadequate, failing to challenge hate in the manner that it warrants. In particular, targeted sanctions frameworks such as Magnitsky Laws – nowadays the paradigmatic tool to punish human-rights abusers – have never been used expressly to combat incitement to violence and discrimination. This is despite many such frameworks being linked to the relevant international treaties, whether explicitly, such as in the European Union and United Kingdom, or implicitly, like in Canada and the United States.

Such sanctions have been a powerful post-facto tool, adding substance to statements condemning discriminatory violence against the vulnerable and – with applicable due-process safeguards – targeting the individuals most responsible for these crimes. They have been used, for example, in relation to Houthi-controlled security and intelligence agencies’ unjust detention and rape of politically involved women in Yemen, Chechen leaders’ torture and murder of LGBT persons, and the atrocities committed by Myanmar’s military, the Tatmadaw, against the country’s Rohingya Muslim minority. But these sanctions, while commendable, deal with the criminal consequences of hate, not its cause.

Rather than providing posthumous redress, targeted sanctions could possibly have prevented such crimes. Rapidly implementing such measures in response to incitement to hatred and discrimination – an initial early warning sign that often foreshadows major crimes – would sound the alarm and shine an international spotlight on the situation, naming and shaming individual perpetrators while providing protective cover to victims.

Moreover, sanctioning such individuals for incitement – typically with visa bans and asset seizures – could potentially serve as a deterrent, as they may modify their behavior in the hopes of being delisted. Even where those listed do not change their ways, targeted sanctions would reduce the virality of their hate by minimizing their resources and restricting their global mobility.

Such sanctions would be an important expression of solidarity and support for those suffering in other countries. Furthermore, they would safeguard the implementing country’s sovereignty by protecting against a corrosive influx of foreign assets and individuals linked to the promotion of divisive – and often deadly – discrimination.

Government leaders who violate internationally recognized obligations by promoting hate should not enjoy the freedoms abroad that they deny minorities at home. Protecting freedom of speech is not inconsistent with holding to account those inciting violence and discrimination. In fact, ending impunity for stirring up hatred would widen the scope for freedom of expression for all, especially for minorities whose voices are suppressed by rampant hate speech.

In these difficult and dangerous times, the shared desire for a peaceful and harmonious future, in which we celebrate our differences and the solidarity of humanity, can be a source of inspiration and a catalyst for global cooperation. To achieve it, we must stand up and strike out against the hate that ultimately hurts us all.

Source: Curbing the Hate Pandemic by Irwin Cotler, Ahmed Shaheed and Brandon Silver

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Canadian-led movement aims to seize assets from dictators to remedy refugee crisis

2018/11/12 Leave a comment

Hard to argue with the principles behind this approach but hard to see how it will be implemented in practice:
A Canadian-led international movement seized with stanching the flow of refugees wants to use an untapped source of cash to address the global crisis: the billions languishing in the frozen bank accounts of dictators and despots.

The proposal will be one of the main recommendations of the World Refugee Council, a self-appointed body of two dozen global political figures, academics and civil-society representatives led by former Canadian foreign minister Lloyd Axworthy.

“We’ve put forward a proposition that where there are frozen assets they should be unfrozen through a proper legal process and reallocated to help the victims of the crime and corruption and instability that the bad guys create,” said Axworthy. “It’s a morality play. The bad guys have to pay to help their victims.”

The World Bank estimates the pool of cash to be worth $10 billion to $20 billion per year, Axworthy said in an interview.

The council was established last year by a Canadian think-tank, the Centre for International Governance Innovation, to find new ways to deal with the 21st century’s record-setting migration crisis — the 68.5 million displaced people driven from their homes by war, famine and disaster.

The United Nations will turn its attention to solving the problem at a special session later this fall, and the council plans to offer its input, using the weight of the last Canadian foreign minister to chair a Security Council meeting.

The UN has acknowledged in stark terms that as the number of homeless and stateless people continues to grow around the globe, their suffering is increased by the shrinking pool of money available to help them.

‘Proceeds put for the public good’

Axworthy says there are fundamental structural flaws in how the world’s institutions are set up to cope with the unprecedented forced migration of people, and a big one is how the bills are paid. The system is based on charity — the benevolent donations of people, countries and businesses — and is not sustainable, Axworthy said.

An October report by the United Nations refugee agency said it expected to raise 55 per cent of the $8 billion it needs to support refugees and internally displaced people this year.

Axworthy said the courts in several countries can be used to seize funds that have been frozen there. Canada, the United States and Britain have all passed legislation allowing them to impose sanctions on individual human-rights abusers. These “Magnitsky laws” are named after a Russian tax accountant who died in prison after exposing a massive fraud by state officials there.

The world could start spending the “tens of billions of dollars moulding away in a variety of banks and other places, purloined money from the warlords, from the bad guys, the dictators, the authoritarians,” Axworthy said.

Irwin Cotler, a former Liberal justice minister and human-rights lawyer who has championed Magnitsky-style legislation, said in a separate interview that these laws can allow to go beyond freezing funds, because once the assets are seized, there’s no point to returning them to their corrupt owners.

“What you want to do is have the proceeds put for the public good,” said Cotler, the founder of the Montreal-based Raoul Wallenberg Centre for Human Rights.

Legal precedent

Canada’s first round of sanctions under its Magnitsky Act targeted people in Russia, South Sudan and Venezuela, including Nicolas Maduro, the South American country’s president.

The refugee council’s most recent report, released last month, focused on the displacement of millions of people from Venezuela. That report urged the United States to take a leading role in seizing billions of “ill-gotten” assets in the country, including the $2 billion that the U.S. Treasury Department estimates has been stolen from Venezuela’s state-owned oil company.

Fen Hampson, who co-wrote the report and is head of the global security program at the Centre for International Governance Innovation, suggested governments need to go beyond their various Magnitsky laws to repurpose the seized assets of “Maduro and some of his henchmen … to help victims and the host countries that are reeling under this growing refugee and migration crisis.”

The Magnitsky Act, named after a Russian lawyer and auditor who was arrested on trumped-up charges and died in prison, has Russia threatening retaliation against Canada. The proposed law targets those responsible for human rights abuses and corruption. 2:15

The report said there is legal precedent to do this: a civil case against the son of the dictatorial leader of Equatorial Guinea resulted in a $30-million judgement, $20 million of which was later used by a charity to help the country’s people.

In Yemen, where most of the inhabitants of the port city of Hodeida were forced to flee Friday as Saudi Arabia’s three-year war on Shiite rebels continued, the UN World Food Program’s country director said a massive cash influx is needed to repair the battered economy and feed a population on the verge of starvation.

Stephen Anderson said it’s up to others, higher up in the UN, to decide whether that money should be siphoned from a warlord’s frozen bank account.

“We’re 100-per-cent voluntary funded,” Anderson said. “The economic issues need to be addressed urgently because that’s affecting the entire population of Yemen. They were the poorest in the Middle East before the conflict so there’s no safety net.”

Source: Canadian-led movement aims to seize assets from dictators to remedy refugee crisis

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Magnitsky bill advances with a strongly Ukrainian flavour

2017/05/24 Leave a comment

Diaspora politics have always been part of modern Canadian politics.

The Ukrainian Canadian community, given its numbers and long history in Canada, has played a major role in recent history (e.g., former PM Mulroney recognizing an independent Ukraine in 1991).

So it is less about the personalities involved than the fundamentals about the history, size and influence of a particular community:

The “Magnitsky Law” is a piece of Canadian legislation, not yet enacted, that seeks to hold governments and individuals to account for human rights abuses.

It’s named after Russian businessman Sergei Magnitsky, who died in a Moscow jail in 2009 after accusing officials of tax fraud. It could help to bring sanctions to other rights abusers in other countries.

In late 2012, the United States adopted the so-called Magnitsky Act, which imposes travel bans and financial sanctions on Russian officials and other individuals believed to have been involved in Magnitsky’s death.

But there’s something about the way the bill is moving forward in Canada that should perhaps give pause to legislators.

Two versions exist: a Commons version written by Conservative James Bezan, and a Senate version written by Raynell Andreychuk. That second version yesterday obtained the support of Canada’s Foreign Minister Chrystia Freeland, who says the Trudeau government will help to push it through the House.

What do Bezan, Andreychuk, and Freeland all have in common?

All three are active members of Canada’s Ukrainian community. And all three happen to be among the 13 Canadians sanctioned by Russia for their supposed hostility to the country.

Diaspora politics

The situation may allow the Kremlin to tell its citizens that the bill is not really about rights abuses, but rather part of a campaign motivated by ethnic animus towards Russia.

Pro-Kremlin news media and bloggers often portray Canada’s Ukrainians as this country’s version of Miami Cubans, a community calling the shots of Canada’s foreign policy on the one issue that obsesses it.

Last year Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov accused the Canadian government of “blindly following the demands of rabid representatives of the Ukrainian diaspora in Canada.”

Canada’s response perhaps did little to defuse that Russian suspicion.

“We will not tolerate from a Russian minister any insult against the community of Ukrainians in Canada,” then-Global Affairs Minister Stéphane Dion responded in the House of Commons. “Ukrainian Canadians, we owe so much to them. We will always support them.”

Magnitsky Bill not just about Russia

Human rights groups have welcomed the Magnitsky Bill, and it has enjoyed support from Russian dissidents Gary Kasparov and Zhanna Nemtsova, the daughter of murdered opposition leader Boris Nemtsov.

It’s also intended to reach far beyond Russia, says MP Bezan.

“This will apply to all countries, whether it’s organ-harvesters in China who are falsely imprisoning Falun Gong practitioners to harvest their organs and tissues for sale around the world, whether it’s people in the Iranian regime that are denying justice and freedom to their own citizens, or even in the case of Saudi Arabia, where they’re targeting people who’ve tried to speak out against the government, this law has global application.”

Source: Magnitsky bill advances with a strongly Ukrainian flavour – Politics – CBC News

Globe editorial on the what they see as the overly broad reach of the Bill: Globe editorial: Senate’s proposed Magnitsky bill needs a rethink

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