Thank you so much, Mr. Chairman. It is an honour to be back before your committee. Thank you for this opportunity and for holding this very important hearing today.

On December 10, 1975, Oslo City Hall hosted the annual Nobel Peace Prize ceremony. Everything seemed in order except for one detail: The laureate, Andrei Sakharov, was not present, and neither were his four guests of honour. None of them were allowed by the Soviet government to travel.

In his Nobel lecture, which was read out by his wife, Elena Bonner, Sakharov wrote, “...I would ask you to remember that all prisoners of conscience and all political prisoners in my country share with me the honor of the Nobel Prize.” He listed 126 names. This was not everyone, but it gave an idea.

Today, according to the Memorial Human Rights Centre, there are 296 political and religious prisoners in Russia. This, too, is not everyone—just those who fit the strict criteria set by the Council of Europe. But it still gives an idea.

Behind these statistics are real people who are being held in prisons, penal colonies, detention centres and under house arrest, having committed no crime against the law, only having crossed the imposed lines of Vladimir Putin's regime: Oleg Sentsov, a filmmaker from Crimea, who protested against the annexation; Anastasia Shevchenko, a single mother and an activist of the Open Russia movement, who became the first person arrested for belonging to an “undesirable” organization; Alexey Pichugin, the remaining hostage of the Yukos affair, who after 16 years is Russia's longest-serving political prisoner; Oyub Titiev, a human rights activist who has documented the egregious abuses of Ramzan Kadyrov's regime in Chechnya; and, Yuri Dmitriyev, a leader of Memorial in Karelia, who has uncovered mass graves from Stalin-era executions.

These are just five names out of 296, and there's a new one literally in the last two days: Ivan Golunov, one of Russia's best-known investigative journalists, arrested on fabricated drug charges.

In the last four years, the number of political prisoners in Russia has increased sixfold. Their continued incarceration violates not only Russia's constitution but our international obligations under the European Convention on Human Rights, the OSCE Vienna Concluding Document and the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, among many others. International bodies, including the European Court of Human Rights and the UN Working Group on Arbitrary Detention, have repeatedly condemned these incarcerations, but appealing to the law is as futile an endeavour in Vladimir Putin's Russia as it was in Leonid Brezhnev's Soviet Union.

The only court that matters is the court of global public opinion. Just as in the 1970s, the best hope, the best defence, for political prisoners in our country is international attention. Back then, prime ministers and presidents of democratic nations put this issue high on the agenda. Prime ministers and presidents, in the summit meetings with leaders of the Soviet Union, would often start by putting the list of political prisoners on the table.

Successive American administrations have successfully negotiated the exchange or release of prominent Soviet prisoners of conscience, including Vladimir Dremlyuga, Vladimir Bukovsky, Alexander Ginzburg and Yuri Orlov. In 1978, Pierre Trudeau, Canadian prime minister, personally handed Brezhnev the legal brief on the case of Anatoly Sharansky, prepared by the man I have the privilege of sharing this table with—Professor Irwin Cotler. Recalled Sharansky: “What was saving us...was the fact that all these important...people” in the west “were supporting us in every speech. They knew our names.”

Nothing of the sort is happening today.

Whatever else western leaders discuss with Mr. Putin, the issue of political prisoners seems to be absent, as if it is normal that, in 2019, a European country is holding hundreds of people in prison for their political or religious beliefs. It is time to break the silence.

One of the principal documents of the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe, OSCE, of which both Canada and Russia are full members, holds that “issues relating to human rights, fundamental freedoms, democracy, and the rule of law are...matters of direct and legitimate concern to all participating States and do not belong exclusively to the internal affairs of the State concerned.” Canada should uphold this commitment.

Canada should set an example by raising the issue of political prisoners, not in general terms, but with specific names and specific cases in every contact with Russian officials, from top-level summits to ministerial meetings to parliamentary assemblies.

Ending the shameful practice of political incarceration and releasing those unjustly held should be a prerequisite to any meaningful dialogue with the Kremlin.

Words matter, but there's more Canada can do than speaking out. In October of 2017 this House unanimously passed the Sergei Magnitsky law, which brought much-needed personal accountability to human rights violators by subjecting them to asset freezes and visa bans. It is my hope that Canada will use this law to sanction those responsible for politically motivated imprisonment in Russia, starting with Prosecutor General Yury Chaika.

Just over a decade after Sakharov's Nobel lecture, nearly all of the prisoners he named were free. This was a result both of the winds of change that swept our country and of the principled position of the democratic world. There will come a day when the current political prisoners are free as well, and when Russia finally puts the shameful legacy of political incarceration behind her. Until that day comes, I hope that our partners and the international community will continue to speak up for justice on behalf of those who are deprived of it at home.

I thank you very much for the opportunity to testify. I look forward to any questions you may have.

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