Sergei Magnitsky

Denis MacShane Excerpts

Wednesday 7th March 2012 Commons Chamber

[Chris Bryant (Rhondda) (Lab)]

I congratulate the hon. Member for Esher and Walton (Mr Raab) on securing the debate. It is important that it is on a motion because the Government must decide what they will do. They must decide whether to support it, and thus take the action that it demands of them.

Several attempts have been made to try to ensure that the debate never came to pass. The Russian ambassador in London attempted to repress a previous debate, which my right hon. Friend the Member for Rotherham (Mr MacShane), a former Minister for Europe, led. I know that the Russian ambassador also tried to ensure that you, Mr Speaker, stopped today’s debate happening. That shows a complete misunderstanding of the political process in this country and the need for democratic and open debate. No ambassador should write to the Speaker of this House to try to prevent a debate. It is perfectly legitimate for us to debate what we choose to debate.

[Mr Denis MacShane (Rotherham) (Lab)]

This is extremely important. I have already had to intervene on this with Mr Speaker after the Russian embassy put on its website a statement attacking me as a parliamentarian for raising the Magnitsky case. Someone has to talk to this Russian ambassador and tell him crudely to butt out of House of Commons business.

[Chris Bryant]

I had already made that point, but I wholeheartedly agree with my right hon. Friend that we will discuss what we want. I very much hope that nothing is put in the way of the all-party group when we go to Russia so that we can meet not only members of the Government, but members of the opposition.

There are two basic problems in Russia at the moment, the first of which is the impunity that attends so much criminality. Hon. Members have referred to Anna Politkovskaya, but many other journalists have been murdered. Had journalists been murdered in this country, everybody around the world would have been howling and demanding justice. Similarly, we are unable to get justice for the murder of Mr Litvinenko, because Russia maintains that no extradition is allowed for any Russian citizen. That prevents justice and means impunity for those in Russia.

The second problem is the regular, systemic state abuse of the criminal justice system in Russia, which has meant that Mikhail Khodorkovsky has been imprisoned on spurious charges—Amnesty International has declared him and Platon Lebedev as prisoners of conscience. It is right that we pursue such issues to try to ensure that there is a proper criminal justice system in Russia, and one that does not depend on torture.

I must confess that the Government’s response tonight is very disappointing. For a start, I did not know that our foreign policy was to wait for the United States of America to make up its mind in its Senate and Congress on what it will do about immigration before we decide what we will do. We should be free to make our own decision, particularly because the one thing many significant Russians in the Putin regime value above all else is the ability to travel to London. London is the place where they like to do their banking and shopping, and where their families like to go for their education, and so on. Ensuring that the people involved in the murder of Sergei Magnitsky and the corruption he unveiled are unable to come to this country is a vital part of ramming home to the Russian Government that we want better relations with them and that we want to do more business with them, but that we can do so only when human rights are respected and corruption weeded out.

--- Later in debate ---

[Mr Denis MacShane (Rotherham) (Lab)]

It is a pleasure to follow the right hon. and learned Member for Kensington (Sir Malcolm Rifkind), because my heart soared when he spoke in Foreign Office questions in January to call for the public naming of the 60 officials associated with Magnitsky’s death. I congratulate the hon. Member for Esher and Walton (Mr Raab) on securing this debate on the Floor of the House.

Just as my heart soared when I heard the right hon. and learned Gentleman, it sank when I heard the official Foreign Office brief read out at the Dispatch Box this evening. The Minister of State knows that I am a fan of his, but in this case I urge him and the Foreign Secretary to make it clear that they are Ministers with a democratic duty to speak up for the House of Commons, which now wants clear action to be taken. It is nonsense to say that we have not named people banned from coming into this country. We have named Martha Stewart, the cook, for goodness’ sake. We also named George Raft, the actor, and Pablo Neruda, the Chilean Nobel prize laureate. If they were good enough to be named, so too can some of these Russian thugs.

I am not proposing a policy of latter day Palmerstonian “advocatus Britannicus sum”, or “Because I am a lawyer representing British interests, I must have some special protection.” I am saying that, as we develop and shape our diplomacy in challenging and difficult times, we have to leave some rusty old tools in the Foreign Office toolbox firmly locked up and sharpen our approach.

I am not going to repeat the comments on the nature of the Russian state that have already been well made by other hon. Members. I am not sure that it consists solely of a relationship between politicians and criminals. Russia is not a functioning constitutional, democratic state that observes the rule of law. There is no distinction between political and business life there, or between state employees and those who run enterprises of any sort. Mr Putin is the chief executive officer of an enterprise, and his Russia exists in order to enrich him and those associated with him, going right down through the state machine. This is vertical power, and what happened to Magnitsky was not a sequence of accidents; it was authorised at a very high level.

The campaign is important, but where are the British lawyers? In the 1970s, when Russian psychiatrists were abusing their medical professionalism by signing off on dissidents being imprisoned for being mentally disabled, the British and American legal and psychiatric professions rose as one to condemn them and expel them from international associations. Where are the British lawyers today? Why are they not standing up for their fellow solicitor or fellow silk in Russia?

We need to look at the broader question of how we deal with Russia. The snow revolution might have petered out on Sunday, but Russians have lost their fear and passivity as they look upon Putin as another long-serving leader. Such leaders exist in western, democratic countries too but, as with Helmut Kohl, Mrs Thatcher and Mr Mubarak, there comes a moment when the fear has gone. I believe that Britain should also lose its fear of speaking up for democracy in action, and take consequent actions.

Under the 70 years of sovietised Russia, very few Russians could travel, but during the Yeltsin and Putin years, we have gone back to the pre-1917 tsarist days when the rich of Russia came here, bought villas and were educated at Oxford, and Prince Obolensky scored great tries for England. Now, they are back in town. I have no particular objection to them, but the one thing that they will understand is being told that they no longer have an entry ticket into London.

I want to make a tiny party political point. I do wish that the Conservatives would quit their alliance with Putin’s stooges at the Council of Europe. They are there for different reasons, and I am not going to go into any of that now, but it is embarrassing that some of our colleagues and friends sit with the Russians in our main human rights body in Europe, at which the Russians are present and can be held to account. The Russians get a free ride there.

I would also like to ask some of our journalists to stop being Putin’s little helpers. If our poor Prime Minister goes for a ride on a horse, it makes the front page of The Times, and everyone mocks him and scorns him and says it is very serious. If Putin pulls on an ice hockey shirt and does a bit of midnight ice hockey, the editor of The Times is there, swooning at the feet of this majestic specimen of manhood. I do not expect the Chelsea football club programme, or The Independent or the Evening Standard, to be tough on Russia, but I think that the rest of our papers could be a bit harder on it.

I finish by quoting Anna Politkovskaya. At the end of her book, “A Russian Diary”, published after her murder in 2006, she wrote of Putin:

“So far there is no sign of change. The state authorities remain deaf to all warning from the people. They live their own life, their faces permanently twisted by greed and by irritation that anybody should try to prevent them from getting even richer. Our state authorities are only interested in making money. If anyone thinks they can take comfort from the optimistic forecast, let them do so. It is certainly the easier way, but it is also a death sentence for our grandchildren.”