OTTAWA, October 5. /TASS/. The Canadian parliament has approved the “Justice for Victims of Corrupt Foreign Officials Act", also known as the ‘Sergey Magnitsky Law’ named after the eponymous Moscow lawyer. The final vote was transmitted on the official website of the Canadian Parliament on Wednesday.

The bill particularly allows the government to freeze assets and ban visas for officials from Russia and other nations deemed guilty of violating human rights.
Now, Canada’s Governor General Julie Payette has to sign it into force, the procedure usually takes up to two weeks.

The US passed a similar law in 2012 under the administration of Barack Obama. The law was named after an auditor working for Hermitage Capital Management, a British investment fund, who was arrested on charge of creating illegal tax evasion schemes for the fund. While under investigation, Magnitsky accused a number of Russian officials of corruption. In November 2009, he died in the Matrosskaya Tishina pre-trial detention center in Moscow, as stated by representatives of Hermitage Capital, after being denied essential medical care.

The relations between Ottawa and Moscow were effectively frozen in 2014 on the initiative of then Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper after Crimea’s reunification with Russia and the conflict in eastern Ukraine.