Good afternoon, Chairman Levitt and distinguished members of the committee. It's a pleasure to be with all of you again here today.

Last month my public interest law firm published this report: “The Kremlin's Political Prisoners: Advancing a Political Agenda By Crushing Dissent”. It's the first comprehensive report on the topic, and it's some 280 pages with 1,700 footnotes. It's also cosponsored by the Raoul Wallenberg Centre for Human Rights, the Free Russia Foundation, the Human Rights Foundation, and the Lantos Foundation for Human Rights and Justice.

I would like to briefly highlight the unique features of the report for you. We have copies for all of you as well.

First, using Memorial's vetted list of prisoners, we've identified eight categories of prisoners held by the Kremlin at the direction of Vladimir Putin, including political opponents, Ukrainian activists and citizens, civil society activists, journalists, religious minorities, ethnic minorities, alleged spies and LGBT persons in Chechnya.

As noted earlier, the number of the Kremlin's political prisoners has increased sixfold in the last four years, from 50 to almost 300 today.

Among this group of prisoners is my client, Alexey Pichugin, the Kremlin's longest-standing political prisoner, who has served more than 16 years on fabricated murder charges. In fact, his arrest was simply a first move by Vladimir Putin against the Yukos oil company. Pichugin remains in jail today because he refuses, as a matter of conscience, to implicate its major shareholders, including Mikhail Khodorkovsky, in crimes that neither he nor they committed.

In the last few days we released an opinion by the United Nations Working Group on Arbitrary Detention, which found that “the discrimination against Mr. Pichugin by the Government on the basis of his association with the Yukos company is the only plausible explanation for his arrest, detention and imprisonment”, and it called for his immediate release.

Second, in our report, we completed the first comprehensive review of the domestic laws used to imprison political opponents of the regime—both laws that are facially invalid as incompatible with international law and those used as pretext—as well as administrative provisions used to threaten, intimidate or harass real or imagined threats to Putin's regime.

Third, we analyzed the wide array of international law violations committed by the Kremlin in imprisoning political prisoners.

Fourth, we looked at the international response and domestic response from media, civil society groups and political parties to the imprisonment of the Kremlin's political prisoners and the playbook for how the Kremlin responds to this criticism.

Fifth, we examined the wide array of ways in which political prisoners have been released both historically and in recent years, including parole pardons, prisoner swaps, amnesties, and reduced sentences and releases for health, among others, as this can provide a road map to see what might be done to help the current crop of political prisoners.

Sixth, we identify across the list of political prisoners the names of judges, prosecutors and investigators in their cases. From there, we identified a group of 16 perpetrators with command or line responsibility for imprisoning political prisoners in Russia. Those responsible at a system-wide level include people like Vladimir Putin; Yury Chaika, the Prosecutor General; and Gennady Kornienko, the director of the Federal Penitentiary Service, among others. Canada has actually already sanctioned four of the eight on our list of those responsible for command responsibility. Those who I mentioned, as well as eight judges, prosecutors and investigators involved in the greatest number of cases, have not yet been sanctioned.

Finally, in our report we present five recommendations for the international community. Each of these recommendations includes more detailed actions, but at a high level these recommended actions fall into the categories of targeted financial sanctions and travel bans on perpetrators; joint actions across multilateral institutions; highlighting the plight of these prisoners; joint civil society efforts; and media engagement.

It is worth briefly focusing on our section on perpetrators. We've advocating for this group of perpetrators to be put onto the global Magnitsky lists, and this is why our report has 1,700 footnotes. We received feedback from many global sanctions offices—including those here in Canada—that, given limited resources, rely exclusively on credible civil society, media, and other reports on human rights abuses in any given country when investigating potential targets to sanction. By presenting a highly organized and meticulously assembled group of sources to verify the evidence that we have presented in our report, we hope this will enable global sanctions offices to have in one place all the information they should require to investigate and verify our claims.

Having represented political prisoners for more than 20 years in my career, I can say from experience that the greatest fear of any political prisoner is to be forgotten. We hope that the Parliament here in Canada will urge the Government of Canada to impose a set of sanctions against the group of perpetrators responsible for imprisoning the Kremlin's political prisoners. Rolling out a set of sanctions for those responsible for the entire system would not only benefit political prisoners in Russia but also send a strong signal to other authoritarian regimes that imprison political prisoners that their systems could be next to be sanctioned.

I know that freeing the Kremlin's political prisoners might, at this moment, seem like an impossible task. It is incumbent on all of us who live in a free society to show the pictures of these prisoners and tell their individual stories, just as we show the pictures of the perpetrators and demand that they be held accountable. It is worth remembering that, as Nelson Mandela said, it always seems impossible until it is done.

Thank you again for the opportunity to testify. I'd be happy to answer questions at the end of our presentations.

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