Geoffrey Robertson. Photo: Jane Bown

Sergei Magnitsky was an accountant, a man who used his ability in mathematics to earn a living crunching numbers and looking after company’s books. He was, those who knew him say, a quiet, respectable, diligent Russian citizen. He was not your fire-in-the-belly, anti-Putin dissident.

Yet he died at the hands of Russian police, alone in prison cell – for doing what he saw his civil duty. Magnitsky dared to inform the police he had accidentally stumbled on a huge tax fraud – and the police, who were benefitting from the scam, made sure his claims would not be acted on.

In a new book about how countries collectively punish those who commit such state-sponsored crime, leading barrister Geoffrey Robertson, who founded Holborn’s Doughty Street Chambers, lays out the ideas behind a “Magnitsky Law.”

Robertson explains how criminals based outside a national jurisdiction can be punished – and how it is vital, in the light of the toothlessness of the UN’s International Criminal Court, which relies on sanctioning nations instead of individuals.

As Robertson explains, Magnitsky grew up in a small Russian town, did well at school, and studied accountancy at Moscow State University. He worked as an auditor, and had the qualifications to provide services to a law firm which, among others, represented America clients.

And it was while working for an American company called Hermitage that he unwittingly discovered a scam by high-ranking police officials and tax inspectors at the Ministry of the Interior. Magnitsky did what was right, and reported what he had found.
It was a decision that cost him his life.

Arrested by the very people he had blown the whistle on, he was held in prison for a year, allowed no phone calls and one, brief meeting with his wife. He refused to change or withdraw his allegations, and fabricated evidence meant he wasn’t given bail.

Kept in horrendous conditions, Magnitsky suffered from pancreatitis and spent months in agony, denied urgent medical treatment. The end came when he was transferred to another prison, and welcomed to his new surroundings by a thorough beating by eight policemen using rubber batons. They then threw him, bloodied and screaming in pain, into an isolation cell. When a doctor eventually entered the cell, Magnitsky was dead. An official statement claimed he died of heart failure and his body showed no signs of mistreatment.

The fate of Magnitsky saw his US-based client Bill Browder, whose firm was an unwitting tool used by the fraudsters, lobby the Obama government to bring sanctions against those involved. Browder felt asking the UN to act against Russia over an individual was unlikely – but the US government could make sure those who were responsible for his death could not enjoy the fruits of their £300m scam in America. The case for a Magnitsky Law was born.

Geoffrey Robertson has served as the president of the UN’s war crimes court in Sierra Leone, which tried and convicted the warlord Charles Taylor. He writes that it appeared, after the Balkans, Rwanda and the conviction of Taylor, that a new dawn of international human rights backed by courts may mean the victims of genocide find justice. Hope and belief was such that in 2011 Syrians protesting against President Assad held up signs calling for him to be take to the Hague
and tried.

“Their expectations were, tragically, far too high,” writes Robertson. “They were mown down by machine-guns and the pole-axed Security Council failed to protect them – and the 400,000 who subse­quently shared their fate.”

Robertson provides an outline of the history of how the idea of global human rights has developed, considering the term’s evolution from Magna Carta and the French Revolution, before describing the rise of the 20th-century concept of human rights. He explains how in the immediate pre-war period it was articulated by the likes of HG Wells, who saw the increasing menace of Nazism and fascism.

Then came the war, and Nuremberg, and the UN’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Post-1945, a legal framework had been created – but political abusers were rarely held to account. Today, Robertson argues, crimes against humanity are widespread and its perpetrators, such as President Assad of Syria, do so with impunity.

It creates a strong argument for a Plan B. In 2102, President Obama signed the first Magnitsky Law – hitting 16 lawyers, judges and doctors who were all complicit in his death. It no longer means criminals can be protected by Security Council vetoes, whose sanctions against nations are shown to have limited value in punishing perpetrators.

Robertson also argues a Magnitsky Law backs up a democratic state’s “proclaimed values”, by warning accountants, banks, lawyers, public relations firms and others that taking lucrative work from criminals should not pay.

London attracts the super-rich – which means it also attracts people whose money has been obtained in ways that are morally dubious. The swathe of oligarchs who have bought property in Hampstead and other must-have addresses include among their numbers people with fortunes provided by asset-stripping regimes – yet are free to enjoy the benefits of our city with impunity.

Robertson argues that “there can be no sensible objection if democratic nations, using their own domestic law, provide a mechanism of accountability and for asserting their own values by ostracising bad people in other states who are complicit in killings and corruption, but who want to enjoy the pleasures, and banking facilities, of the West.

“If they do really oppose them, why open their banks and money markets to the profits from such crimes, and welcome their profiteers to buy their finest homes and enrol their children at their best schools?”

• Bad People And How To Be Rid Of Them – A Plan B For Human Rights. By Geoffrey Robertson, Biteback Publishing, £18.99