Benjamin L. Cardin: “Thank you, Chairman Carper, for convening this hearing.”

What you have done to strengthen the transatlantic partnership is incredible.

To be true to our founding principles we need to support those people trying to defend human rights, those rights endowed to us by our Creator.

That is why virtually every international aid organization that has operated worldwide for decades says they have never experienced a worse manmade humanitarian disaster than that in Gaza.

I introduced the Sergei Magnitsky Rule of Law Accountability Act as a way of saying that we will hold abusers accountable even if their own country does not.