Sergei Magnitsky was a good and honest accountant. It cost him his life.
But his legacy has the power to save others now, including a 46-year-old Philadelphia-area mother and Christian businesswoman named Marsha Lazareva who’s been unjustly detained in Kuwait for about two years. Her case is begging for Global Magnitsky Act consideration by the Trump administration.
Magnitsky was famously imprisoned in 2008 after uncovering massive theft committed by a ring of corrupt Russian government officials. He was falsely accused of wrongdoing and remanded to Moscow’s Butyrka prison without trial, where he was beaten and denied urgently needed medical care, leading to his death after 358 tortuous days.
The fate of Magnitsky was so egregious that it sparked international outrage over false detentions like his. President Barack Obama signed the bipartisan Global Magnitsky Act into law in 2016, adding significant bite to American rhetoric. The law authorizes tough sanctions against foreign government officials involved in human rights abuses anywhere on the globe, freezing their assets and banning them from entering the United States. In recent months, the administration has used this foreign policy tool against individuals in Burma, Nicaragua, and Saudi Arabia.
In 2017, Lazareva was falsely accused of embezzlement by Kuwait and soon thereafter railroaded into a jail cell. She was required to wear a burqa, attend court hearings on Sundays, including on Easter Sunday and Orthodox Easter Sunday, was not able to practice her religion and was encouraged by Kuwaiti jail authorities to convert to Islam to receive more favorable treatment. She was denied basic fair trial rights or due process, was not allowed to see her son, and was forced to hide Christian religious artifacts from display in her cell.
Unable to even present a defense, Lazareva served 474 days in an overcrowded Kuwaiti prison before it was uncovered that the evidence used against her in court had been forged by a Kuwait government official. That official is now facing charges, and Lazareva’s “conviction” has been officially nullified by the Kuwait Court of Appeal.
However, the single mother is still trapped in Kuwait, where she’s caring for her four-year-old son and subject to a travel ban that prevents her from leaving the country and returning home to Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania. She is also unable to practice her religion freely because of her confinement.
Her son, Yvan, was supposed to begin kindergarten in the Philadelphia suburbs at the end of August. But his schooling, as well as his planned baptism at St. Andrew’s Russian Orthodox Cathedral, is being indefinitely delayed. As if that’s not bad enough, Marsha’s ailing mother needs to undergo serious liver surgery in Philadelphia in the coming weeks without her daughter and grandson nearby.
Rep. Madeleine Dean, among other members of Congress from both parties, is speaking out, urging the Trump administration to employ the Global Magnitsky Act to punish this unjust government behavior and to get Lazareva and her boy home. Religious leaders, including the Philadelphia Council of Clergy, are doing their part, too. That is why In Defense of Christians has decided to lend its voice as well in imploring the Trump administration to utilize the law to its fullest extent.
History is marred by instances of false imprisonment. Sergei Magnitsky’s suffering gives us the power to fight them. We should use it.
Toufic Baaklini is president of In Defense of Christians.
