Stop the Untouchables. Justice for Sergei Magnitsky.

Magnitsky: A New Human-Rights Law for Russia—and the World

The Daily Beast

A young Russian lawyer uncovers what looks like a massive tax fraud. He tells the police. But instead of investigating the alleged crime, the cops—in league with the officials he accuses of perpetrating the fraud—throw the lawyer in jail and subject him to torture. He refuses to retract his accusations, and he’s finally beaten to death. For good measure, he’s prosecuted posthumously for a list of trumped-up crimes. The police who jailed him, meanwhile, are promoted and decorated. Russian officialdom protects its own.

If Russia’s courts won’t bring the guilty parties to justice, who will? The U.S. Congress has just voted to make it America’s job. The Sergei Magnitsky Rule of Law Accountability Act (named for the 37-year-old tax lawyer who died three years ago), bars everyone implicated in Magnitsky’s detention, abuse, or death from visiting the U.S., owning property there, or holding a U.S. bank account. The Senate is to pass its bill soon. Similar laws have already been adopted in Canada and across Western Europe.

Those penalties may be scant punishment for murder, but the Magnitsky Act could have outsize consequences. The American and European laws are open-ended, applying not only to the suspects in the Magnitsky case, but to human-rights violators around the world. “We have an opportunity to target those in the Russian, Syrian, and other rogue regimes who resort to torture or extrajudicial killing to silence the voices of freedom and democracy,” says Dominic Raab, a Conservative British member of Parliament. “[They] should not be free to waltz down King’s Road to do their Christmas shopping.”