Thank you, Mr. Chair.
Thank you, Señor de Soto, for your appearance here this morning and for the very important information you've been able to provide to our committee.
You've talked about the importance of property rights. I think that is significant and it is something that we haven't focused on before in our study.
I think you were also touching on commercial dispute resolution systems. In my previous life, I was an international commercial lawyer. I often saw the difficulties in bringing foreign investment to developing countries because of the lack of legal systems that would allow commercial disputes to be resolved in a commercially reasonable and viable way.
Two years ago, I travelled with a Canadian parliamentary committee to Afghanistan and was told by local people there that one of the things the Afghan people liked about the Taliban system was that they had a commercial dispute system. Although there wasn't a democratically elected government, there was a local imam they could go to. If there were a property dispute between two farmers, they could rely on the imam to give them a reasonable and fair resolution to the dispute, and he wasn't corrupt. Later, under an elected government, they had a rather corrupt legal system, and the local people couldn't trust the decisions the system made with respect to commercial disputes between two farmers.
Could you give us your views on how western countries, such as Canada, could assist countries in developing legal systems that would support enterprises? Do you think that's important, and if so, how would we go about doing it?