Fighting Impunity: A guide to how civil society can use ‘Magnitsky Acts’ to sanction human rights violators

by Safeguard Defenders, Safeguard Defenders

As increasingly more countries adopt ‘Magnitsky Acts’, the space for civil society to use these is expanding, helping bolster efforts to sanction those responsible for gross human rights violations worldwide. The Magnitsky Acts represents a major development in protecting human rights and punishing perpetrators. What makes these Acts so different from other sanctioning mechanisms is that their targets are individuals, not countries or states. Another key difference is that many have been designed with civil society in mind in terms of structuring the process of filing recommendations for targets to be sanctioned. These Acts have opened up crucial channels through which governments can benefit from civil society’s advantage of often being best positioned for recommending rights violators to be sanctioned. However, as with any sanctions scheme, politics, bureaucracy and procedure can make the submission process confusing; in some cases key information is not even in the public domain. The material in this book is derived from extensive interviews with diplomats, government officials, activists and others involved in the behind-doors decision process, with knowledge of absolute best practices, the underlying politics and how to incorporate all these into a robust recommendation. The result is the first-ever comprehensive manual for civil society on the best approach for making a successful ‘Magnitsky submission’.

74 pages, Paperback

Published January 19, 2020