The attempt to nationalize the Magnitsky Act in Moldova has three important particularities, political pundit Dionis Cenușa wrote in a feature article for IPN Agency.
According to him, the first aspect shows that the human rights persist in the draft law proposed by the parliamentary opposition in July 2018, alongside the name Magnitsky, on which Bill Browder insists in the case of the EU.
This way, the amendments to the legislation on the regime of foreigners and on the prevention of money laundering and terroirs activity has seven provisions related to the violation of human rights and six provisions concerning acts of corruption. The Magnitsky Act version proposed for Moldova reveals the wish to combine the protection for human rights with the toughening up of the rules for corrupt foreign officials who are actively involved in illegal financial transactions.
The second particularity resides in the prevailing of the interest in combating corruption and money laundering that affected the Moldovan banking system (case of “the Russian laundromat”, banking fraud).
The justificatory part of the draft bill puts emphasis on illegal financial transactions committed by using the banking system and offshore areas, including the facilitation of acts of corruption. Also, the goal indicated for the Moldovan Magnitsky Act is primarily to protect the national financial and banking systems and to then impose restrictions on those involved in acts of corruption and afterwards in actions violating the human rights.
The order of priorities in the draft law reveals the tensions that exist between the anti-government opposition, including the critical civil society, and the oligarchic political regime consolidated around the Democratic Party in 2016-2018.
The third essential particularity that explains the size of the support for a Moldovan Magnitsky Act refers to the Democratic Party’s decision to introduce the mechanism for providing Moldovan citizenship by foreign investment that took effect in 2017.
Consequently, the adoption of a Magnitsky Act is regarded as a way of preventing the negative consequences of the government’s decisions concerning the naturalization of foreigners whose names can be related to acts of corruption and violation of human rights, noted Dionis Cenușa.
The return to the Moldovan Magnitsky Act will depend, on the one hand, on the composition of the government that will be formed after the parliamentary elections of February 2019. On the other hand, the intensity of the approach for such an Act could be determined by the progress of the efforts to “Europeanize” the regime of individual sanctions against foreign officials who violate human rights, concluded the politologist.
