Bill Browder presented Labor Senator Kimberly Kitching with the Sergei Magnitsky Human Rights Award at the 2021 ceremony in London.
Boston Global Forum congratulates Senator Kitching on receiving this honor.
Kimberley spoke at the Democratic Alliance for Digital Governance on July 1, 2020, organized by Boston Global Forum and at the United Nations Centennial Roundtable, organized by AI World Society Network (AIWS.net). She called for legislations and regulations for transparency and accountability of governments in digital and AI.
She will speak about concepts for a powerful global mechanism to enforce Global Law on AI and Digital at the Symposium ““The Framework for Global Law and Accord on AI and Digital” on Global Cybersecurity Day.
8:00 am – 11:00 am (EST), 14:00 – 17:00 (CET), December 12, 2021.
The death of Sergei Magnitsky sparked a fierce global backlash. In the US, the Obama administration introduced legislation, commonly called the Magnitsky Act, to sanction the officials complicit in Magnitsky’s death.
The legislation has since been adopted by 32 other countries and recently been used against Chinese officials over the persecution of Uighur Muslims in Xinjiang.
Momentum in Australia to adopt a similar bill stalled until Kitching took up the cause following a Zoom meeting with Browder.
“Australia’s a country that’s completely on the other side of the world and for years I’d been trying to get things going, and I couldn’t get any traction at all,” Browder told the awards ceremony.
“And the moment I met Kimberley on Zoom, everything started to happen.
“She got the government to agree to do a Magnitsky Act and I understand that it will pass in the next two weeks and Australia will be the 34th country in the world to have a Magnitsky Act.
”We almost have the whole world covered.“
Kitching paid tribute to her fellow “Wolverines” – Liberal China-hawks Senator James Paterson and Assistant Defence Minister Andrew Hastie – as well as Foreign Minister Marise Payne and the former Labor MP Michael Danby, who had pushed for an Australian Magnitsky Act before his retirement in 2016.
“We’ve never given up on having this law, it’s been delightful to find allies across the aisle and in the crossbench,” she said.