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Watch Lucy Komisar: Magnitsky Acts are dangerous laws based on a hoax

- Citizens Party Media Release

Learn the truth that Parliament is trying to cover up!

What’s behind the so-called Magnitsky legislation that Australia’s Five Eyes partners want Australia to enact, and which the gang of Anglo-American loyalists in Parliament who call themselves the “Wolverines”—including Andrew Hastie and Kimberley Kitching—are ushering through Parliament? The law would empower Australia to impose sanctions on targeted officials in other countries accused of human rights abuses, but that’s the cover story.

In the latest episode of the Citizens Party’s Citizens Insight interview series on YouTube, Robert Barwick interviews legendary American investigative journalist Lucy Komisar, who lays bare the hoax that is being perpetrated on the Australian Parliament and people. When Australians hear the real story, they will be shocked that laws can be made on the basis of such outrageous lies.

Click here to watch Citizens Insight: Magnitsky Acts are dangerous laws based on a hoax—Interview with Lucy Komisar.

Lucy Komisar exposes the two-pronged agenda behind the push for Australia to enact a Magnitsky law, one personal and one strategic. The personal is the agenda of British-American financier Bill Browder, who is lauded as a champion of human rights for his campaign to enact Magnitsky laws all over the world, but who has a long history of tax fraud and other financial crimes, including as a front man for the giant British crime bank HSBC. Magnitsky laws are based on Browder’s account of the death of his accountant Sergei Magnitsky in a Russian prison in 2009, which Browder turned into a cause célèbre for human rights. Lucy shows how Browder’s story is a lie, even down to the detail that Magnitsky was his accountant and not his “lawyer” as Browder claims, and that Magnitsky tragically died from medical neglect in a poorly resourced Russian prison, but not from being beaten to death by Russian guards as Browder fabricated a number of years later. Far from Magnitsky and Browder exposing Russian corruption, as he claims, Magnitsky assisted Browder in his extensive tax fraud against Russia, for which the Russian authorities took action against them. The Magnitsky Acts that Browder influenced first the US Congress, and then the UK, to pass, allow those governments to sanction individual officials in other countries accused of human rights abuses, and Browder ensured the original targets included the mid-level Russian tax investigators who were investigating his tax fraud. As Lucy states, the Magnitsky Act is really the Bill Browder Protection Act.

Strategic agenda

The Magnitsky agenda is now bigger than Bill Browder though. His campaign has become a convenient weapon for the Five Eyes partnership—the intelligence agencies of the USA, UK, Canada, Australia and NZ—which are pushing Magnitsky laws as a way to weaponise human rights accusations against countries they are targeting for strategic confrontation and regime change. Bill Browder’s celebrity has coincided with the all-out Anglo-American demonisation of Russia and Vladimir Putin, as Russia has increasingly resisted the evil regime-change agenda that has plunged the Middle East, North Africa, and Eastern Europe into murderous wars. Nothing Browder claimed was questioned, simply because he was attacking Putin.

The human rights angle is a fraud, Lucy shows, and in fact Magnitsky laws actually undermine human rights principles. They deny the accused targets any due process; they are imposed without evidence for political reasons; and they create a precedent for totalitarian countries to copy for their own advantage. The real intention of the law is not human rights, but to allow geopolitical schemers to use unverifiable accusations of human rights abuses to destroy the possibility for diplomacy and dialogue between nations that are essential to avoiding war.

The Magnitsky agenda has since expanded to include China, which, judging by the Australian Parliament’s Foreign Affairs Defence and Trade Committee’s inquiry into the proposed Magnitsky law, appears to be the main intended target. The vast majority of submissions were from groups making wild accusations against China, and the volume of submissions suggests these groups were privately invited to make submissions as part of a campaign to create the impression of overwhelming demand for this law. The committee is dominated by the most vicious anti-China politicians in Parliament, including Andrew Hastie, Kimberley Kitching and Eric Abetz, and Kitching has already given notice she will introduce a bill for a Magnitsky law in Parliament.

(Their efforts follow an unsuccessful previous attempt to enact a Magnitsky law by former Labor MP Michael Danby, a patron of the extreme British neoconservative think tank the Henry Jackson Society, which boasts that countries can be bombed into becoming democracies and demands regime change in all countries that are not US-UK-subservient “liberal democracies”, including—madly—China.)

There are other indications the committee’s inquiry was effectively rigged. The committee accepted Bill Browder’s testimony without question, and even allowed him to perjure himself by stating outright lies, despite having received numerous submissions that had proved his story to be false. The most powerful of those submissions was from Lucy Komisar herself, but it was heavily redacted by the committee to protect Browder. The actions of the committee show the fix is in, and Australia is expected to toe the line with the USA and UK and enact this dangerous law that is intended to sabotage any chance for Australia to repair its relationship with China, and push us into the camp of the mad Anglo-American neocons plotting war.

Watch the Citizens Insight interview with the fearless Lucy Komisar to learn the truth that Parliament has tried to cover up.

Foreign Policy