To commemorate the International Day of Democracy, PGA, and the Raoul Wallenberg Centre for Human Rights (RWCHR) organized a Panel Discussion on Magnitsky-type “sanctions” and how legislators can contribute to preventing and fighting impunity for the violation of human rights. The panel will be composed of leading experts and legislators whose work is dedicated to defending democracy and human rights.
The webinar, which took place on 15 September 2020, included a panel composed of leading experts and legislators whose work is dedicated to defending democracy and human rights. The discussion included the Chair of the RWCHR, Honourable Irwin Cotler; Ms. Margareta Cederfel, Member of the Swedish Parliament and President of PGA; Mr Bill Browder, Co-Founder of the Justice for Sergei Magnitsky Interparliamentary Group; and PGA Secretary General Dr David Donat Cattin.
Biographies:
Irwin Cotler is the Chair of the Raoul Wallenberg Centre for Human Rights, an Emeritus Professor of Law at McGill University, former Minister of Justice and Attorney General of Canada and long-time Member of Parliament, and an international human rights lawyer.
A constitutional and comparative law scholar, Professor Cotler is the author of numerous publications and seminal legal articles and has written upon and intervened in landmark Charter of Rights cases in the areas of free speech, freedom of religion, minority rights, peace law and war crimes justice.
A leading Parliamentarian on the global stage, he has been Chair of the Inter-Parliamentary Group for Human Rights in Iran; Chair of the Inter-Parliamentary Group of Justice for Sergei Magnitsky; Chair of the All-Party Save Darfur Parliamentary Coalition; Chair, Canadian National Group of Parliamentarians for Global Action and Member of its international council.
Bill Browder is the founder and CEO of Hermitage Capital Management, which was the investment adviser to the largest foreign investment fund in Russia until 2005, when Bill was denied entry to the country and declared a “threat to national security” as a result of his battle against corporate corruption.
Following his expulsion, the Russian authorities raided his offices, seized Hermitage Fund’s investment companies to steal $230 million of taxes that the companies had previously paid. When Browder’s lawyer, Sergei Magnitsky, investigated the crime, he was arrested by the same officers he implicated, tortured for 358 days, and killed in custody at the age of 37 in November 2009.
Since then, Mr Browder has spent the last years fighting for justice for Mr Magnitsky. The Russian government exonerated and even promoted some of the officials involved so Browder took the case to America, where his campaigning led to the US Congress adopting the ‘Sergei Magnitsky Rule of Law Accountability Act’ in 2012, which imposed visa sanctions and asset freezes on those involved in the detention, ill-treatment and death of Sergei Magnitsky (and other human rights abuses). Browder is currently working to have similar legislation passed in Magnitsky’s name across the European Union.
Margareta Cederfelt
is Member of the Swedish Parliament where she has served since 1999. In the Swedish Parliament, she serves on the Committee on Foreign Affairs and the Committee on European Affairs. Ms. Cederfelt was elected in 2017 as the new President of Parliamentarians for Global Action.
At the 26th Annual Session in Minsk, Ms. Cederfelt was elected as the Vice-President of the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe Parliamentary Assembly (OSCE PA). She served as an Alternate Member of the Swedish Delegation to the OSCE PA from 2010 to 2014, and since 2014, as Deputy Head of the Delegation. She has taken part in numerous election observation missions with the OSCE PA, including in Russia, Georgia, Turkey and Belarus, and was head of the OSCE PA observation mission to Tajikistan for the 2013 presidential election.
In 2019, she was appointed Rapporteur of the OSCE Commission of Enquiry on the assassination of Russian opposition leader Boris Nemtsov, which was tasked with reporting on the circumstances of the assassination and evaluate the effectiveness of the Russian investigation. Since February 2020 she has also served as Acting Chair of the Ad Hoc Committee on Migration. Ms. Cederfelt has actively worked to defend democratic values, the rule of law, peace and security.
David Donat Cattin (Ph.D Law) is the Secretary-General of Parliamentarians for Global Action (PGA), the largest global NGO of individual lawmakers. He worked to promote the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court (ICC) in more than 100 countries. Under his coordination, PGA contributed to the ratification process of 78 out the current 123 States Parties to the Rome Statute, including Japan, Mexico, and El Salvador.
Since May 2012, he teaches International Law at NYU’s Center for Global Affairs. In 1999-2018, he has been lecturer at Salzburg Law School on International Criminal Law, Faculty of Law (Austria). In 2001-04, he coordinated the LLM Program on International Cooperation Against International and Transnational Crimes at University of Teramo (Italy), Faculty of Law. He intervened an expert-witness before the German Bundestag, Italian Chamber of Deputies, Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe, European Parliament, and Africa-Caribbean-Pacific—European Union Joint Parliamentary Assembly. In 2011, he formed part of Commonwealth’s Working Group that re-drafted the Commonwealth Model Law to Implement the Rome Statute of the ICC in National Laws.
