Saying he was poisoned in Russia, ex-Canadian justice minister fights a Kremlin bullying campaign

Following last week’s sudden death and sudden near-death of two prominent opponents of Russian President Vladimir Putin – one of whom is a lawyer for murdered Moscow lawyer and whistleblower Sergei Magnitsky — a former Canadian justice minister and parliamentarian, heavily involved in the movement to combat corruption in Russia, told The Times of Israel that he believed he had been the victim of foul play.

In a phone interview from his office in Montreal, Irwin Cotler – a longtime lawyer for Soviet dissidents and refuseniks – recalled that during a 2006 official visit to Moscow, he went out to dinner with a colleague and a few hours later began vomiting blood.

“He and I ate exactly the same thing,” Cotler recalled of his dinner with fellow Canadian MP Joe Comartin, during an interparliamentary trip to the Russian capital. “Later, back at my hotel, I began to vomit blood and became really sick. I called the hotel and asked for a doctor. They sent cleaning ladies instead, who cleaned up the blood.”

Cotler then called the Canadian Embassy, who sent a doctor. Cotler was rushed to the European Medical Center in Moscow, where he was hospitalized for several days, undergoing tests and injections. He subsequently flew back to Canada, where he remained ill for months afterwards. In Moscow, his liver and pancreas were X-rayed, but he received no response to his inquiries as to what had occurred, and no investigation, as he had requested. While Cotler has no conclusive proof he was poisoned, he now believes it likely.

“When it happened, I figured it was a bad case of food poisoning. Until I began to connect the dots.”

Cotler, a human rights lawyer, had represented Soviet dissidents in the 1970s and 1980s, including Andrei Sakharov, Natan Sharansky and Yuli Edelstein. In 1998 he represented accused spy and environmentalist Alexander Nikitin, who had been imprisoned by the FSB, the successor organization to the KGB, while Putin was its head.

“People say Putin has a long memory,” Cotler remarked, speculating as to why the Russian leader might have felt motivated to poison him.

Cotler first publicly discussed the incident in 2014, after he was placed on a Russian blacklist of 13 Canadians who are prohibited from entering Russia, the third time he has been so banned. Cotler’s revelation received a modest amount of publicity at the time, but has renewed relevance now, in light of the mysterious death and near death of Putin opponents and the FBI investigations about Russian interference in the US presidential election campaign.

Further connecting the dots, Cotler said he began noticing, shortly after his illness, that other outspoken critics of Putin’s regime were suffering a high rate of mortality and sickness.

Cotler’s former colleague from Yale Law School, Luzius Wilhaber, the former president of the European Court of Human Rights, became violently ill, with similar symptoms, after a three-day trip to Moscow in October 2006. Wilhaber had previously angered the Russian government by upholding the complaints of Chechen human rights activists.

A month later, former KGB and FSB officer Alexander Litvinenko died from drinking poisoned tea in London. Litvinenko had become an outspoken critic of the Putin regime and an informant for the MI6.

In 2009, Russian lawyer Magnitsky died in prison after allegedly exposing a $230 million tax fraud committed by allegedly corrupt officials colluding with gangsters in Russia. Two key Russian witnesses in the case, Valery Kurochkin and Octai Gasanov, died of liver failure and heart failure, respectively. Alexander Perepilichny, a whistleblower in the multi-million tax fraud case, died of apparent poisoning while jogging near his UK home, in November 2012.

Russian democratic opposition leader Boris Nemtsov, who had come to Canada to support his Justice for Sergei Magnitsky legislation, was gunned down on February 27, 2015. Nemtsov’s protege, a young liberal politician named Vladimir Kara-Murza has twice succumbed to severe and sudden illnesses that he believes were brought on by poisoning.

Then, last week, former Russian MP turned Kremlin critic Denis Voronenkov was gunned down on a street in Kiev. And a lawyer for the family of the deceased Magnitsky, Nikolai Gorokhov, who was about to testify in two separate Magnitsky-related trials in Russia and the US, fell from a fourth-floor balcony in Moscow last Tuesday. Gorokhov suffered severe head injuries but miraculously survived.

“You see that Gorokhov’s injuries have to be contextualized in terms of what has happened to other people who were connected to the Magnitsky case,” Cotler told The Times of Israel.

All told, said Cotler, there are about 40 “journalists, lawyers, human rights activists, opposition leaders and dissidents who are connected to each other or all connected by virtue of the fact that they have been critics of Putin, who have been assassinated, poisoned and the like.”

The people behind these assassinations or attempted assassinations are rarely held to account, he said, and in many cases are even rewarded.

In some instances, the hit men are put on trial, but there is no inquiry into who sent them.

Putin for his part said in a 2013 Russian television interview that while Magnitsky’s death was a “tragedy,” investigators had “concluded that there was no malicious intent, or criminal negligence in Magnitsky’s death. One might think no deaths occur in US prisons.”

Cotler said that citizens of liberal democracies may not fully grasp the extent to which Russia’s nascent steps toward democracy in the 1990s have been aborted

“Three things in Russia that people don’t always appreciate, and Magnitsky is a case study of it, are the intertwined cultures of corruption, criminality and impunity. People speak of the culture of corruption and the culture of criminality in Russia but they miss the third point, that is the culture of impunity, that nobody is brought to justice, and those who seek to bring the officials to justice — not only inside Russia but outside Russia — become targets of the regime.”

‘Mafia state’

In “Convergence: Illicit Networks and National Security in the Age of Globalization,” a 2013 book published by the US Department of Defense, foreign affairs experts Michael Miklaucic and Moises Naim describe Russia as a country where the mafia and government are increasingly indistinguishable.

Organized crime groups, they write, “are able to infiltrate ‘their own members’ into positions of governmental responsibility… and subvert the legitimate intent of the state from the inside for ulterior — criminal — purposes.”

“While Russian state institutions continue to engage in traditional governmental activities — making and enforcing laws, adjudicating disputes, providing services admittedly often without competence or efficiency,” they add, “the government often practices either neglect or complicity with illicit network activity throughout the country.”

In 2010, a senior Spanish investigator, José “Pepe” Grinda Gonzalez, told a group of US officials in Madrid that Russia has become a “virtual mafia state.”

He described prosecuting organized criminals from the former FSU, and realizing he was up against a formidable force with the full infrastructure of a state behind them.

“Here I am, a prosecutor, a magistrate in Spain, but on the other side of me I face the best lawyers that can be hired in Spain and I face nation-states that are deploying diplomats, the military, intelligence and spies.”

Before his murder, Boris Nemtsov, the Russian pro-democracy leader, lobbied the US Congress, Canadian and European governments to pass “Justice for Sergei Magnitsky” laws that would personally sanction Russian officials whom Western governments believe were involved in the death of Magnitsky, who has become a symbol and rallying cry for some members of the pro-Western Russian opposition.

“In principle, the Magnitsky Law would be unnecessary if a truly independent judiciary and law enforcement agencies that actually enforced the law existed in Russia,” Nemtsov said in an April 2013 interview, “and if thieves and criminals were actually punished for their actions. But in the years under Putin, the independent judiciary has been destroyed, law enforcement agencies are under the control of the interests of a corrupt regime and the thieves and criminals loyal to the regime are at large and actually promoted for their services.”

The US Congress was the first to pass the Magnitsky Act in 2012, prohibiting several dozen individuals believed to be Russian human rights abusers and corrupt officials from travelling to the US, buying property, or using the banking system. Moscow was outraged by the law and in retaliation prohibited Americans from adopting Russian babies.

In March 2015, before Cotler retired from the Canadian parliament, and after holding hearings on the need for Justice for Sergei Magnitsky legislation, the Canadian parliament unanimously adopted Cotler’s motion urging the legislature to pass a Canadian Magnitsky Law. Such a law has not yet passed in Canada but in the meantime Cotler said the law has evolved into a “Global Magnitsky Human Rights Law,” that would sanction individual human rights abusers in any country.

The expanded legislation has been adopted by the US Congress, and Cotler believes versions of it will soon be passed by the UK, Canada and the European Union. Even the small Baltic state of Estonia recently passed Justice for Sergei Magnitsky legislation, Cotler pointed out, “to ensure that Estonia will not be a country where Russian violators can travel freely or launder their assets.”

As journalist Luke Harding recently told USA Today, “If you steal money in a place like Russia, you have a problem. You need to convert it to rubles and dollars and put it somewhere someone can’t steal it from you. One place to do that is buy real estate in New York, Miami or London.”

Last week the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP) and a worldwide consortium of journalists released a series of articles dubbed the “Russian Laundromat,” which detailed a pattern of corrupt Russian officials moving billions of dollars of assets out of the country through complex offshore schemes and laundering some of their money through UK and US banks. Asked if “Justice for Magnitsky” laws would curb such activity, despite the fact that it is financially advantageous to some people in the West, Cotler replied that he hopes so.

“Enforcement will be crucial. If enforcement is globalized, Russia may get the message and start to curb its own cultures of corruption, criminality and impunity, which it shows no signs of doing.”

The case of Israel

Israel, said Cotler, shows no signs of passing “Justice for Sergey Magnitsky” legislation. Cotler recalled that he wrote an article on this issue for the Israeli media in 2012. Then and now, when Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu meets with Putin, the case of Magnitsky is not on the agenda.

“I understand that the issues of Iran and Syria are at the forefront for Israel. I am not unmindful of the national security threats to Israel,” Cotler noted.

Nevertheless, Cotler said Russia’s culture of corruption, criminality and impunity can be a problem for Israel.

For instance, Israeli banks have helped launder money for Russian oligarchs, while large-scale fraudulent industries, like binary options, have been allowed to flourish here. A May 2009 diplomatic cable by the US ambassador to Israel warned that “many Russian oligarchs of Jewish origin and Jewish members of organized crime groups have received Israeli citizenship, or at least maintain residences in the country.”

The United States estimated at the time that Russian crime groups had “laundered as much as $10 billion through Israeli holdings.”

“I think it might be advisable for there to be a parliamentary inquiry into whether – and the extent to which – this culture of corruption has extended into Israel, and is involving Israelis in that orbit of corruption and impunity,” Cotler suggested.

Unfortunately, he said, when he talks to Israelis about Magnitsky, most have never heard of him.

“Looking at it through the lens of an Israeli, they say, understandably, ‘we have much more important things to worry about, namely security threats.’ But one hopes that a country can walk and chew gum at the same time.”

Cotler views Magnitsky legislation as a tool the West can use to pressure Russia and curb the malignant spread of Russian criminality, much like the United States’ 1974 Jackson-Vanik Amendment pressured the Soviet Union to allow Soviet Jews to emigrate.

“Israel is a responsible member of the international community. Its close allies and friends (the US, UK and Canada) are in the process or having adopted or adopting such legislation. When Israeli MKs come to Canada or the US or UK or engage with fellow parliamentarians, they should at least able to discuss the justice for Sergei Magnitsky legislation, to be part of the conversation.”