UN Watch brought the head of the Global Magnitsky Justice Campaign, Bill Browder, to the floor of the U.N. Human Rights Council to confront Vladimir Putin and his oppressive regime.
Full Transcript:
UNHRC President: I now give the floor to United Nations Watch by video.
Bill Browder: Hello. My name is Bill Browder. I’m the head of the Global Magnitsky Justice Campaign. I was once the largest foreign investor in Russia until I was expelled from the country declared a threat to national security. My offices raided. My lawyer, Sergei Magnitsky was arrested tortured and killed in Russian police custody.
Since then, I’ve been on a mission to get justice for Sergei and to discover what’s really going on in Russia. What I’ve discovered over the last fifteen years since Sergei was murdered is that Putin’s Russia is a mafia state it’s a kleptocracy. Putin and a thousand people around him have stolen a trillion dollars from the Russian state.
That was money that should have been spent on hospitals, schools and roads instead was spent on private jets and yachts and Swiss bank accounts. That’s an unsustainable situation and the Russian people eventually would have risen up. Putin understood that. And so what does a dictator do who has stolen too much money and is afraid of his people rising up?
He creates a foreign enemy and he starts a war. That’s what the war in Ukraine is all about. This is not a war about NATO. It’s not a war about the empire of Russia. This is a war of Vladimir Putin trying to stay in power. The U.N. and all other organizations should do everything possible to stop this war and to help Ukraine.
UNHRC President: Well, excellencies, dear participants in my capacity as president I cannot but draw the attention on the fact that all our discussions should be respectful of the dignity which is inherent to our dialogues, which is very important for all of us. I mean to make these dialogues go in the right way.
