Foreign Affairs

Lord Mackenzie of Framwellgate Excerpts

Tuesday 5th March 2024 Lords Chamber

[Lord Mackenzie of Framwellgate (Non-Afl)]

My Lords, addressing your Lordships’ House today about multiple murders is a flashback to my former life as a detective superintendent and graduate of the FBI Academy in Quantico, Virginia. This debate is very timely, not just because the world appears to be in turmoil but because I received a letter last week about the incarceration, for 25 years, of Vladimir Kara-Murza, in a strict regime prison in Russia.

Vladimir Kara-Murza is a radical critic of Vladimir Putin’s Russia and the war. He was educated at Cambridge University and has joint British/Russian nationality. The jointly signed letter is from three British subjects in London, who have all had their lives tragically turned upside down by Vladimir Putin. The first of these is Professor Michael Borschevsky, whose wife, Galina, a scientist and distinguished vocal advocate of democracy, was murdered by shooting in St Petersburg by Russia’s Federal Security Service, of which Putin was then in charge, in 1998. The second is Marina, the wife of Alexander Litvinenko, a Russian defector who was poisoned by a radioactive substance in London in 2006 by Russian FSB agents.

Finally, the third is Bill Browder, who believes that he himself is a target of Putin for campaigning for justice in the case of his Russian solicitor, Sergei Magnitsky, who was advocating for him in a fraud case in Russia in 2009 when he was arrested and led to a freezing isolation cell in a Moscow prison, handcuffed to a bedrail and beaten to death by eight corrupt police officers. Mr Magnitsky had uncovered evidence that they had stolen £230 million of taxes paid to the state by a very successful hedge fund. Mr Browder has campaigned tirelessly and successfully for severe international sanctions against corrupt Russian individuals, known as Magnitsky sanctions. Mr Magnitsky’s killing remains uninvestigated.

Your Lordships will recall other similar assassinations of Putin’s opponents, such as Boris Nemtsov, who was shot on a bridge in Moscow, and most recently, of course, as has been mentioned several times, the disgraceful death of Alexei Navalny, an opposition politician whose tragic funeral took place in Moscow last weekend. He was also a poison victim, who is believed to have been murdered in a severe Arctic prison.

Could I ask the Foreign Secretary whether representations have been made to the Russian authorities regarding the imprisonment of Vladimir Kara-Murza? All three of my correspondents are in effect exiled from Russia for safety reasons and bring a large amount of experience and intelligence in these matters over many years. Would the Secretary of State agree to meet the three distinguished authors of the letter in my possession, of which I can let him have a copy, with a view to shining a light on the case and preventing Mr Kara-Murza suffering the same fate as Alexei Navalny? I look forward to a positive reply from the Foreign Secretary.